


Infinite Possibility

by charlottesometimes



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Loki (Marvel), BAMF Thor (Marvel), Canon Divergence - Post-Thor: The Dark World, Caretaking, Darcy Lewis & Loki Friendship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Processing, Excessive Drinking, Gen, Hurt Loki (Marvel), Hurt/Comfort, Infinity Gauntlet, Infinity Gems, Loki (Marvel) Angst, Loki (Marvel) Feels, Loki (Marvel) Gets a Hug, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Loki (Marvel) Redemption, Loki Whump, Loki and Thor brother feels, Loki having friends, Magic, Magical Exhaustion, Manipulative Loki (Marvel), Mind Control, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Panic Attacks, Plotty, SHIELD being shady, Thor (Marvel) Feels, Thor (Marvel) is a Good Bro, Torture, Tricksters gotta trick, Violence, Warning: Loki (Marvel), Whump, depressed Thor, magical healing, or at least he's trying
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2020-01-04 11:37:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 47,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18342911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charlottesometimes/pseuds/charlottesometimes
Summary: Even then, Loki could feel Thanos straining against the walls of Loki's prison dimension. It was a matter of time before the Titan tore free.But for now, Loki had five of the Infinity Gems, and needed only one more to have what he wanted.Omnipotence. Ultimate power.The power to change the past, or to make a greater future.Yes.Yes, he would make a greater future. He would … rule. He would fix everything, make everything right. What did “omnipotence” mean, if not the power to make things exactly as he wished them, no matter how complex? Could one with omnipotence not giveeveryonewhat they wanted?~*~Plot, hurt/comfort, and emotional processing. As it says in the tags, canon-divergent post The Dark World. So anything after the dark world did not happen.Please enjoy!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Updating on Mondays. Fic is already complete, but posting over time.
> 
> I wrote this because I have A Lot of Feelings and Ideas about the directions Loki's and Thor's story arcs have gone in since after The Dark world. In particular I have feelings and thoughts about Infinity War and Thanos. So this is my take on a story that involves the Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos, Thor, and Loki.

“Thanos the Eternal,” Loki said with a coolness he did not feel as he stepped through the fabric of reality and into the massive throne room of the Titan's star base. “A pleasant evening.”

“Is it evening on Asgard?” Thanos replied, his back to Loki. He was looking out the window near his throne at a winking starscape.

Loki looked away. He did not like space. He did not like its emptiness. It put him in mind of … falling. And he did not like to be put in mind of falling. He could already feel his chest constricting.

And he resented it.

“Yes,” he said shortly, fisting the edge of his tunic. “And I have something for you.”

“I know,” Thanos said. He joined his hands behind his back and continued to gaze, and Loki did not press the Titan to turn around. He focused his eyes on the flagstone floor.

The Serenity II was, as always, freezing, and Loki began to shiver as he waited for Thanos to conclude his gazing; the base had been built by and for creatures with fewer bodily weaknesses than Loki.

Only when Loki's already-exhausted limbs began to tire and stiffen, and Loki's pride began to revolt—that Thaos should continue to have this effect on him, this cowing—did Loki speak again.

“If you could take a moment--”

“Oh, Loki!” Thanos said, turning. “I forgot you were there.”

And he grinned. Loki's stomach went cold.

“Ah, yes. I am right here,” Loki said. He swallowed. The bulky Titan standing before the window reminded him of Heimdall the Gatekeeper, if Heimdall were about six times his size and fixated on destroying half the actual universe.

Not that any of that, any of Thanos' strengths or plans, mattered to Loki any more. He was about to get his five minutes with the Time Gem. Right now. Within minutes--the past would be obliterated. Falling would be obliterated. The memories of Byyrenll's face, obliterated. Frigga's travesty of a death, obliterated. Defeat after defeat, obliterated.

The disappointed Frigga still harbored when she died: Obliterated.

Maybe “obliterated” wasn't the best choice of word.

… Undone. That was better. Remedied.

“What can I do for you, little prince?”

Little Prince. A loaded term for Loki, and Thanos knew it. 

Loki's mind flashed him images of stealing the Gems, blasting Thanos with the Power Gem, deleting Thanos with the Reality Gem, changing himself to a stronger creature, crushing Thanos beneath his foot–

_No, no, stop, stop the thoughts, he will see–_

But Thanos was already laughing.

“You do not believe any of that, little prince, do you? That you could really do any of that to me? Your magic is a flutter. Using the Gems that way would break your body in an instant.”

Loki realized he wasn't breathing, and inhaled. After a few breaths, he trusted himself to speak.

“I have the Power Gem for you,” he said.

“I know,” Thanos rumbled. He finally–finally–moved away from the window and toward his throne. Loki imagined he could feel the ground shake a bit with each of the Titan's steps, and had to grip his tunic again to keep his hands from trembling. The footsteps reminded him too much of his time as a resident of this ship. And now, they also reminded him too much of the steady footfalls of the guards outside Odin's chambers, marching up and down, every night, keeping Loki safe inside in the cage of his illusion, the illusion that he was in fact Odin, King of Asgard. Making Loki wonder each time they passed if, this time, those feet marched not to patrol past his door, but to take him away to the dungeon.

“Mmm, that does sound unpleasant,” Thanos said, bringing Loki back to himself. He had gripped his tunic with such tight fists that his fingernails were biting into his palms through the fabric. 

“Please do not do that,” Loki answered.

“Yes, I forgot,” Thanos said, seating himself upon the raised throne. “You hate that.”

“I do.”

“Give it to me,” Thanos said. He held out his hand, fingers like blocks of stone, palm up. “Now. And you will have your five minutes with the Time Gem.”

Loki reached through the fabric of his reality. Ever since he and Thanos had begun to work together, the Reality Gem had responded only to Loki, much to Thanos' displeasure. And one of the results was that it was easier than ever for Loki to create, maintain, and access pocket dimensions for storage purposes.

He extracted the Power Gem from one of these pockets. It glowed red like animal eyes in the dark as Loki crossed the few feet toward Thanos. This Gem more than any other gave Loki a bad feeling, but he could not say whether that had to do with the energy of the gem itself or with the war he had been forced to launch to obtain it.

The Titan's hand was cold as rock when Loki set the stone there. Thanos' fist closed around the gem, and he shut his eyes.

Loki retreated to a safe distance from the throne once more.

After a moment Thanos exhaled, and a new grin spread across his face. “My,” he said. “This is a good one. My favorite yet.” He laughed. “This one will make trouble.”

Enough time passed with the Titan in that pose for Loki to wonder whether he wouldn't be left standing here in the cold room for another long stretch. But then Thanos opened his eyes.

“Good work,” he said. Loki, in spite of himself, felt his shoulders relax measurably and a treacherous warmth start in his chest.

Thanos would read in Loki's mind that he liked the compliment, but Loki hid it anyway. “Fine, Thanos,” he said. “Give me the Time Gem.”

Thanos snapped the red gem into the Infinity Gauntlet on his left hand—the false Gauntlet the dwarves had created was in Asgard, in the weapon's vault, keeping up appearances.

Then the Titan drew his arm away from his face and turned it this way and that, as if to admire it. Just one of the six settings was empty; the Soul Gem was still in the possession of someone Thanos referred to only as “The Channeler.”

After a moment Thanos pried the orange one from where it was mounted on one knuckle. “You know, this one is tricky,” he said. Then he looked up at Loki and went on: “Catch!”

The gem arced from Thanos' fist and began to fall toward the flagstone floor several feet from Loki.

With a flick of his wrist Loki swallowed the gem into a reality pocket and spit it back out into his open palm.

Thanos laughed. “Excellent,” he said. “You know, if this really is goodbye, I want you to know: I do like you, little prince. I liked at first only your rage, but ever since I brought you back I have liked the whole of you very much. You’ve proved quite fixable.”

Loki pressed his mouth shut to keep his retorts in, and gave his mind a moment to settle. “Thank you, Thanos,” he managed finally. Thanos would have heard everything Loki thought about him. But that was part of Thanos' game: Loki must behave as Thanos would want him to behave, even though they both knew what was going on in Loki's head.

But it didn't matter now. The orange Time Gem lay heavy in Loki's palm. He had never held it before. Unlike the Reality Gem, which Thanos had allowed Loki to access from the beginning of their re-acquaintance simply because Loki could wield it well and Thanos could not, Thanos had kept Loki from the Time Gem.

Because all Loki wanted, the only thing he longed for in all the universe, was a second chance to succeed. “I certainly hope that this is goodbye,” Loki replied. And he closed his eyes.

The gem in his hand opened up a landscape of magic in his mind unlike any he had seen before, just as each of the other gems he’d used had done. It wasn't quite as clear to Loki as when he held the Reality Gem, but he could make out patterns.

“Take me back,” he told the gem, pushing as much magic as could into it. “Take me back to that moment in Asgard, just before I entered the dark path to Jotunheim to meet with Laufey for the first time. Take me back.”

Loki waited.

Nothing happened. It was like stepping down a staircase in the dark and finding a step was missing.

The gem … Oh, god. The gem …

It could tell him the past, or a future. It could make him young today, or old. It could stop someone or something in the flow of time. 

It could not take him back. That …

The Gem whispered to him: _That would take the full Gauntlet, all six gems. You ask too much._

Loki clutched the Gem more tightly. It would take the full Gauntlet. Just resurrection required the full Gauntlet. And just like fooling the magic binding Asgard's Old Ways to accept Loki as King and pass the Kingforce on to him, even though he was both unworthy in the King’s eyes and in his heart unwilling, the two great prohibitions for a successor.

Just like rewriting one's own personality.

Just like every damned thing he had hoped the Gems could do for him.

What in the Nine were they good for?

Loki jerked his eyes open, his muscles tensed to fight–but there was no one and nothing to fight. Just Thanos sprawled on his throne, smiling placidly at Loki.

Smiling like he was unsurprised.

“You knew,” Loki spat. “You knew it couldn't.”

Thanos nodded. “I did know, little prince,” he said delightedly. “You cannot change the past like that. You cannot get your second chance.”

Clutching the Gem so hard reopened the tiny puncture wounds in Loki's palm, and slick blood leaked onto the Gem’s smooth surface. He forced himself to open his hand, and looked down at the bloody stone.

It would take the Gauntlet. The full Gauntlet to … rewrite his history. To undo his battles lost. Thanos knew that. _And he’d led Loki on anyway._

A plan formed all at once in a corner of Loki's mind, and before he even dared to put the thoughts into words he was acting. A flick of the wrist and the opening to a new pocket dimension emerged from reality nearby. The pocket was stronger and more durable than any Loki had created before; another flick of magic and –

Thanos had less than a half-second to register Loki's thoughts. Realization showed as horror on his face. 

The Infinity Gauntlet fell to the floor with a clink as Loki closed the pocket dimension around the Titan. 

Loki gasped, and felt his knees buckle beneath him.

Had he just ... Had he just imprisoned a Titan?

Panting and shaking on his knees, all his magic spent in one go, Loki listened for the sound of guard's footsteps coming to apprehend their leader's sudden and unexpected captor. But there was no sound in the high-ceilinged chamber but the echoes of his own ragged breaths. Perhaps Thanos had asked to be left alone with Loki.

Loki's sudden relief at having avoided whatever Thanos had planned for him after the Time Gem failed did a lot to calm the shaking in his limbs, which were exhausted by the huge expenditure of magic.

He could feel Thanos straining and railing against the walls of his new prison, and Loki knew it would only be a matter of time before he tore free.

But for now, Loki had five of the Infinity Gems, and needed only one more to have what he wanted.

_Omnipotence. Ultimate power._

The power to change the past, or to make a greater future.

Yes. Yes, he would make a greater future. He would … rule. He would fix everything, make everything right.

What did “omnipotence” mean, if not the power to make things exactly as he wished them, no matter how complex? Could one with omnipotence not give everyone what they wanted?

Loki crawled toward the Gauntlet and laced it onto his left wrist before clicking the bloodied Time Gem back into its setting. He would need to wait a little while for his strength to return, before using the Space Gem to portal home to Asgard; it took magic to use the Gems, at least for Loki. And if a creature of Yggdrasil pushed their magic use too far, it could do grievous damage to mind and body – it could even kill. And you didn’t know, until that happened, that you had even gone too far.

Loki had done it before. A few times. It was best by far to avoid it.

So he listened again for signs of retaliation on the ship, and heard only the silence of the vast throne room; then he put a small invisibility glamour on himself, and waited for a bit of his magic to recharge. He had work to do. Work to do, and a plan forming in the back of his mind.

For the first time since he had died and been resurrected, Loki was in control.

~*~ 

Hours later, back in the palace at Asgard, Loki locked the door to Frigga’s sitting room behind him and listened hard. No footsteps came from the hallway. Loki seemed to be alone in the royal quarters. He dropped the illusion that made him appear as Odin, and crossed the room. 

The wooden case that held Frigga’s scrying glass sat on a gilded table near the window. Asgardian constellations winked at him between brocade drapes as Loki approached. He avoided looking directly at the stars.

He tried, too, not to be aware of the room he stood in. He angled himself so he could not see the dusty healing stones at the other end of the table. He would not look at the cloth still half-unspun in the loom. Nor at the full copper water cup still set on the windowsill, left by Frigga, which neither Loki nor the real Odin had ever emptied or removed.

His hand shook as he lifted the case. Soon, he would know how to find the Soul Gem, and assemble the full Gauntlet. He could leave all this behind. Frigga’s scrying glass would tell him where to find The Channeler, and Loki would have all he needed. 

It had to work. Because Loki had just determined–using a spell that wove his magic with that of the Time Gem and the Reality Gem–that he had twenty-one days until the walls of Thanos’ pocket dimension collapsed, depositing the angry Titan in his throne room once more. Improving the dimension so that it _wouldn’t_ collapse had proven impossible; Loki just didn’t have the power to make something both strong enough to hold a Titan and fully stable.

So in twenty-one days, Loki's chance was up. By then, if he didn't have the Gauntlet and the omnipotence that came with it, then Thanos would find him and take the Gauntlet back. Thanos had, from what Loki could surmise, the ability to psychically home in on the location of anyone whose mind he knew well. And on top of that, four of the five Gems they'd collected together responded massively more intensely to Thanos.

So all in all the fact was: No matter where Loki went, Thanos would find him, and he would take what was his.

And that would be – well. It wouldn't exactly be a party. Thanos' aims … It didn't matter what Loki thought of them. Because if Thanos got out, and Loki wasn't ready, Thanos would continue in his quest to “improve” all the creatures of the universe. 

And, once again ... Loki would help. There would be no point in resistance. He’d never managed to remember anything well enough before, when confronted with the Titan. This time would be no different. He would be right back there, chafing at Thanos’ epitaphs (purring at Thanos' approval, working for those broad grins– _stop that_ ), just as he had been after he fell. He'd held up better the second time, after his resurrection, _mostly because of what Frigga–_

Stop.

Stop.

Loki took a breath.

All he had to do was find the Channeler, and take from him the Soul Gem. With the Soul Gem in hand, Loki would have the full Infinity Gauntlet. And the Infinity Gauntlet, made whole, was a different thing entirely than any individual Gem. With omnipotence, Loki could swat Thanos like a mosquito. 

Loki flipped back the lid of the case that held Frigga’s scrying glass, the most powerful scrying glass in the Nine Realms. 

… Blank black velvet lay in the case where the glass should have been. 

And then a knocking came at the door.

Loki jumped, then stiffened. He put on Odin’s voice illusion.

“Leave me in peace.”

The knocking came again. Louder.

Loki felt each knock like a skipped heartbeat. He put down the case, and took a breath to steady himself. _There is no reason_ , he thought, _to assume anyone is on to you._

“Who dares disturb the king here?” he asked.

There was another pause, but then, “Heimdall,” came the familiar voice of the Gatekeeper. “I would speak with you.”

“It could not wait until this afternoon's sitting? You must disturb me while I'm in Frigga's chambers, of all places?”

“No. It cannot wait.”

Loki didn't like this. He didn't like the timing, he didn't like that the glass was missing, and he didn't like something in Heimdall's voice.

He couldn't get caught, not now. And certainly not by the man who saw everything and could go anywhere with a moment's notice. He needed the freedom to do what he had to do, now, without fear of interference from Asgard. He needed Asgard oblivious to him.

Heimdall could not be on to him.

He picked up the copper cup and touched the water's surface with magic. The Gatekeeper's image appeared in the liquid, tall and stern, standing just outside the door. He was alone. His sword hung from his belt, yes; but it often did, when Heimdall left Bifrost. 

Loki pricked up his magical senses, searching the area outside the door for spells. There was nothing unusual. Just the usual Asgardian soup of Yggradsilian enchantments, the _bryjoda_ for arms and armor, and a few domestic charms. 

_He probably got a new message from Vindrheim_ , Loki realized. 

Shaking his head and restoring the Odin illusion around himself, Loki crossed to the door. 

If there was a problem here, he wasn't sure he had the magical energy right now to deal with it. He didn't know yet how the Gems would react, now he alone was their master, with only his own magic to anchor them. The Gauntlet itself was no use, not yet. It couldn't anchor any of the Gems unless it anchored them all; that's what the dwarves made it to do, a hundred generations ago. So Loki's own magic would have to do, until he found the Soul Gem.

He arranged his face into an expression of regal distaste, and opened the door.

A bright sword flashed toward him, Heimdall's yellow eyes narrowed above it. Bared white teeth gleamed in the sitting room's firelight.

There was no time to think. Loki conjured a dagger and deflected the sword, ducking toward the loom. “Heimdall!” he said, his voice the stately voice of the Allfather. “What is this madness?”

The sword slashed at him again. “ _What_ ,” the Gatekeeper said as Loki parried, “is that in your hand? Has the lowly dagger become the choice weapon of the Allfather?”

Loki looked down at the dagger. His dagger. Not a weapon for a king.

. . . Well. He'd made a mistake. A stupid, stupid mistake. He must be flagging even more than he realized.

His mind raced. A new plan formed, and he looked back up.

The illusion of Odin melted around him. He smiled. “How did you know?”

“I've suspected since you launched a war on Vindrheim,” the Gatekeeper answered, circling Loki. “I consulted Kvasir today. He scried you on that ship. You are once again in collusion with Thanos the Eternal.” He stopped. The sword drooped a few inches. “Why, Loki?”

Loki ignored the plea beneath the question. He ignored the memory of Heimdall after Nidavellir, when he'd told Odin that Loki was telling the truth–and that Loki had nothing to apologize for. Even though that hadn't been what you might call the sole truth of it.

“'Collusion' is a strong word,” Loki said. “I was using him. But I'm through with him now. I have five Infinity Gems, and I will soon have the sixth. Would you perhaps like to pledge your allegiance to me now, so I don't have to forced you to do it later?”

Heimdall raised his sword, on his guard. After a moment he said, “You cannot speak the truth. The Gems have been scattered since the time of Bor.”

“Until I found them,” Loki replied. He conjured an illusion of the Gauntlet over his hand; the real one, he left safely in an alcove of reality. “Last chance.”

Heimdall thrust.

Just as quickly, Loki flicked one wrist.

The sword, and Heimdall, froze – suspended in time. The pull of the Time Gem's power through Loki's magic felt like a burning in his chest, and he gasped at the heat of it.

Even that small use of the Gem felt taxing. And Loki wasn't sure how the spell would hold.

But before he could decide whether to fortify the spell, or find another way to dispose of the Gatekeeper, a voice came from behind Loki. Quiet, and flat.

“Release him.”

Loki turned. Odin Allfather stood in the doorway. He leaned heavily on Gungnir, the knuckles of his right hand white where he gripped it.

Odin must have called his staff to his hand from Loki’s hiding place.

Loki was, momentarily, stunned. Impossible, his mind insisted. That’s impossible. Thanos assured me he would not awaken.

The sorcerous sleep Thanos cast over Odin must have broken, Loki realized. The Titan's powers did not, apparently, cross the lines between realities.

He nearly laughed, then. “You suppressed the Kingforce to occlude it as you approached me,” he said to Odin. “Clever. A bit underhanded for your taste, I'd imagine. But you did it. You snuck up on me. Well done.”

Odin's lips parted as if he would speak.

But Loki didn't care. He raised a hand and cast the freezing spell with the Time Gem again.

Gungnir came up, and Loki felt his own power – and that of the Gem – rebound into him. It hit him square in the chest.

He staggered backward, knocked over the loom; righting himself, he tried to take a breath. Something – or more than one thing – kept him from it. He tried again, and managed. Barely.

“What have you done, Loki?” Odin asked. His face was blank. His voice was soft. As if Loki no longer moved him even to anger. As if Loki was a force of nature, nothing personal, nothing worth worrying about. As if –

But no. It did not matter what Odin thought. It was precisely that _condescension_ , that dismissal, that Loki sought to squash, with the Gauntlet.

“I've done what I had to do,” he spat back. “What anyone would do in my position.”

Odin responded before Loki could collect himself. A beam of energy shot from Gungnir and streaked toward Loki. 

Loki barely managed to erect a barrier with the Reality Gem; it was a shaky thing, at best. But it held. The shot fizzled and disappeared a foot from Loki's body.

Both Odin and Loki paused, shocked at this failure of the Kingforce spear.

Loki looked up from where the barrier had been, and laughed. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, I see now. You did not occlude the Kingforce's magic from me. It's just grown so weak, I hardly feel it at all. Is that it? Have you finally, after all these years of worrying over it, dipped below the power level even of your grandfather before the schism?”

At that, Loki got a reaction. Odin gritted his teeth and raised Gungnir once again. With a lurch of his power which Loki certainly could feel, the Allfather freed Heimdall from Loki's freezing spell.

Loki jumped sideways, out of the way of Heimdall's sword as it finished its path toward him.

The Odinforce might have weakened to the point that Loki did not recognize it. But still, it unweaved his spell without effort.

Heimdall slashed at him again. The bright swordpoint came within inches of Loki's leather-clad stomach. Loki caught the blade on the pommel of his dagger a hair's breadth from his body.

For a moment, he managed to hold it there. Heimdall looked him in the eyes. He could feel himself losing this match of force, the sword blade parting the leather of his tunic.

Odin moved into view behind Heimdall, standing straighter now. "This is the end, Loki," he said. "No more. You are the greatest traitor Asgard has ever known. I should have killed you when I had the chance."

Loki wheezed out a laugh. "I _did_ tell you that, at the time."

Gungnir rose again. Blue light flared.

Loki pulled on his magic to erect another barrier. The magic flickered, depleting and slow to respond.

Pure force sizzled into Loki's chest, slamming him backward into the wall. His fingers loosened on the dagger and it spilled from his grasp. Heimdall's sword followed Loki, and sliced into the flesh of his abdomen.

Loki swallowed a grunt as pain darkened the edges of his sight. He stopped breathing.

 _This shouldn’t be happening_ , Loki thought. He had _five Infinity Gems_. He was above this now.

He could feel blood running from the fresh wound on his stomach, hot.

Heimdall held his swordpoint against Loki’s chest, seeming to wait for the Allfather before he would run Loki through.

“Do it,” Odin said.

In a fraction of a moment, Loki reviewed his options.

Then he removed both Gungnir and Heimdall's weapon from their reality, and relocated them safely elsewhere.

Heimdall looked down at his empty hands, shocked. Odin clenched his empty fist.

Loki could not help but chuckle.

The motion sent a shock of pain through the gash in his stomach, and he winced.

With a cry, Odin swiped at the air with the hand that had held Gungnir. Loki felt the twinge of Yggdrasil's magic he always felt when Thor called Mjolnir to his hand.

The Kingforce spear lurched out of the pocket reality Loki had created, back into Odin's fist.

In an instant, he would fire again.

Desperate, Loki tried the Mind Gem. He pushed out, into the Allfather's mind–but immediately felt repelled. The power slipped, fluttered away; he could not hold it firmly. Odin's mind was as closed to him as Thanos' had been.

Short of hiding _himself_ indefinitely inside a pocket reality, Loki could think of no way out. And with the injuries he had sustained already, he might die there, his body never to be found.

He had to get out of this, and he had to ensure that Asgard would not interfere with anything he tried to do afterward.

At the last possible fraction of a moment, inspiration struck.

“Well,” he said, resisting the impulse to waste magic steadying the tone of his voice. “This has been a fabulous reunion. It's too bad that I really must cut it short.”

He called upon the Space Gem, and stepped backward into nothingness just as another blast from Gungnir smashed into the spot in the wall where he'd been.

The rudimentary attempt at a new spell, one Loki had never mastered -- teleportation -- succeeded thanks to the Space Gem. Loki emerged from space just behind Heimdall. He wrenched the surprised Gatekeeper’s head toward him. 

Calling another dagger from the _bryjoda_ , Loki cut Heimdall’s throat, deep.

Before Loki disappeared again, he saw the look on Odin's face.

Shock. Sadness.

Horror.

Nothing Loki had not seen before.

When Loki appeared beside Bifrost, only a little of Heimdall's blood had drained onto his sleeve. But it was enough that, when he looked at it, a drop fell to the Rainbow Bridge beneath his feet. It looked black against the bright lights of the bridge. 

_Soon_ , he thought, swallowing. _Soon, it will not matter._

Then he looked up at Bifrost.

It swam a little in his vision. His chest throbbed. The slice in his stomach bled. He brought a hand up, and pressed it against the flow of blood.

What he meant to do now was not such a huge expenditure of magic, not for him, and certainly not with the magnifying abilities of the Reality Gem. But he still wasn't sure he had enough magic left.

Odin's footsteps sounded behind him. Good: his attempt to pull the Allfather with him out here had succeeded. He could move not only himself through space, but others; good to know. 

“You asked what I've done,” Loki said. “What I've done is nothing compared to what I will do.” He turned around. “And I'll start with this.”

He raised his gauntleted hand and, in a flourish, brought it down.

A great crack sounded from the ground beneath their feet. The Rainbow Bridge broke at a point just past where Loki stood. A screech like glass on glass followed, and the Bifrost listed backward, over the abyss, suspended on underwater steel beams.

“It really is a pity for you that Asgard never found a way to make the magic of the Bifrost work somewhere less exposed,” he said. “It's too bad you've never had a great enough magical mind work on Yggdrasil.”

Odin stared at him, his teeth bared in concentration. A surge of Kingforce welled up around the Bifrost, willing the broken pieces of the bridge back together.

It did nothing.

Obviously.

It really was quite funny, Loki thought, that Odin had never bothered to learn how to assess the presence of different varieties of magics. What was it like, to be so strong and yet so oblivious?

Well. Loki would never have the Kingforce, so he would never know.

Not that he wanted it – or needed it – anymore.

He flourished with the gauntlet again. A wrenching sound and a woosh roared up from the water as the Bifrost tipped further backward, stopped for a moment at the point of falling – and fell.

A small cry escaped from Odin's lips, just audible above the suddenly steady sound of water rushing over the edge of the abyss.

The Allfather closed his eyes, apparently in despair. 

Loki drew himself up. “You will understand, in time,” he said. “You will see I did what I had to do.”

“I will not,” Odin replied. He put out a hand. Loki felt Yggdrasil reach out for Gungnir once more.

Loki laughed. "It won't work," he said. "I banished it to Svartalfheim. It will be weeks before it arrives."

A shadow seemed to pass over Odin's old blue eyes. Loki allowed himself to imagine–just for a moment–that it was fear. Real fear.

Loki smiled. 

"It seems," Odin said, "that you have grown in power. I can no longer check you. In the name of justice and the Old Ways of Asgard–in the name of everything that you have ever cared for–I give you one chance: Give up the Infinity Gauntlet. Give it up and come with me. We will repair all you've done. Together.”

Loki grinned. "A more desperate plea, I have never heard. Nor a sweeter sound.” He let the illusion of the Gauntlet go, to create the impression he'd hidden it away.

Odin did not respond immediately. He paused, in fact, a little too long, just looking at Loki.

Finally he said, “What will you do now then, my son?”

Loki took a step back.

Then he laughed. “Your son!” he said. “Your son. I am your son now? Was this then the test you'd set for me? Assemble the Infinity Gauntlet, and you will welcome me back?”

Odin shook his head. “You were always my son. Even – ”

“Even when you sentenced me to a lifetime of imprisonment in the common dungeons? Even when you – ”

Loki cut himself off. He couldn't breathe again. And he did not owe this to Odin. Odin was _provoking_ him. Intentionally.

Loki's pieces were poised to make the capture. Odin had nothing on the board.

“Do you know why Thor is not on Asgard?” Loki asked.

Odin shook his head. "I know only that you ensorceled me, ruled Asgard in my place as a traitor-king, and conspired with a Titan."

“I offered him the throne when I sat on it in your place,” Loki said. “He turned it down. He wants never to be king. He does not trust himself. He does not feel his life under you prepared him to lead.”

“Then perhaps,” Odin said, “it could still be you. If you would give up— ”

“Oh no, Odin. No. I am the greatest traitor Asgard has ever known. And you brought me into this family. You brought me into your palace. You made me. This is your legacy. Your children: a spectacular traitor, and a child-prince who prefers the company of mortals to the seat he was born for. And you age so quickly now. The Kingforce is reduced to a flutter of itself. No crisis of succession such as this has faced Asgard is written history! You have done a spectacular job, Odin Allfather. There is only piss poor recourse in the spells of Yggdrasil for such poor stewardship: Indefinite extension of your life, as you wait for an heir to materialize from you know not where? As you only grow weaker and weaker every year? The ancients must have been barely able even to conceive that those provisions would ever really be necessary. They could not _imagine_ such failure.”

This had the intended effect. Just as his words had done once before – without his meaning for them to – Loki's speech seemed to weigh down the Allfather. He sunk down, knelt on the Rainbow Bridge. “Loki— ”

Loki closed the space between them and dropped down to look him in the face.

“Do not worry, Odin,” he said. His voice came out quieter than he mean it to. “When you awaken, it will be another world. A better world. I promise you that.”

“A better world – or a world in your image?” Odin asked. He put a hand on Loki's, where the Gauntlet had been.

Loki's lip curled.

He tapped Odin's forehead with two fingers. “Goodbye,” he said. The Mind Gem managed this, at least; he nudged the magic of the Kingforce further down the path it had already begun, toward the Odinsleep. Odin closed his eyes and slumped to the ground.

Lit in kaleidoscope by the Rainbow Bridge, Odin’s unconscious form was a lurid lump. The nausea that crept suddenly up Loki’s throat might have been from that, or from blood loss. He didn’t know.

He shook his head, and looked up.

Only then did Loki consciously realize that, on the landward side of the bridge, a battalion of Einherjar raced toward him.

He certainly did not have the strength, nor the time, to deal with them.

Twenty-one Asgardian days to find the Soul Gem. And now, he _had_ to succeed in finding it. Perhaps the only other force in the universe that _could_ have opposed Thanos was the Kingforce, and Loki had most probably just destroyed what was even left of that in Odin. And no suitable candidate for succession existed. Yggrasil would never allow Odin to pass on the throne to one unwilling to take it on.

Just as the Einherjar reached Loki, he rose. Too fast; blood leaked from his stomach, and pounded in his head. He could feel his grip on consciousness slipping.

“Sorry, men,” he said. “I've got a better party someplace else.”

And he disappeared.

~~.O.~~

Kvasir did not feel it when Loki appeared in his chamber the next day, and replaced Frigga's scrying glass with a hastily-conjured copy.

The Channeler felt, for a moment, that someone was watching him. But – as it turned out – he knew nothing of scrying magic, nor of astral projection. Loki went undetected about his business.

On Midgard, Agent Satchell of Shield found himself compelled that night to buy a length of rope. He used it to make a cat-o-nine-tails. This, he hid in his briefcase. 

His friend Agent Wallman ordered the implementation of a series of experimental programs, all of which she had blocked several times before. Suddenly, they all seemed like great ideas to her.

A man who called himself the Warden, captured by the Avengers several weeks before, could swear he heard derisive laughter as he sat alone in his cell in Shield captivity. But since no one was there, he went back to writing letters of apology to all those he had hurt.

Steve Rogers, in his Brooklyn apartment, could sense that something, somewhere, was _wrong_. But that was probably more of what they called “anxiety,” he decided. And the feeling passed quickly.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We catch up with Thor, who has relocated with Jane to New Mexico in search of some peace and quiet. 
> 
> The peace and quiet doesn't last long.

“Hey!”

The rocky ground of Svartalfheim beneath Thor's and Loki's feet began to shake and buck as if with an earthquake, or else—

Or else Thor was lying on his and Jane's bed, and Darcy had just launched herself onto the end of it, waking him up.

Darcy brandished a clear plastic bag of green and leafy vegetable life at him. “What's this?” she asked.

Jane came into the sunlit bedroom behind Darcy, but hung back from the bed and folded her hands, obviously trying not to laugh. 

Thor sighed, and hauled himself to a sitting position, the huge leather-bound _Portals, Gateways, and Other Magical Liminalities_ sliding down to his lap from where it lay open on his chest. He rubbed sleep from his eyes. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Like almost noon,” Darcy said. She shoved the bag under his nose. “Tell me what this is.”

“You don't have to guess,” Jane said. Darcy was always trying to teach Thor the names of Midgardian things, and recently she was on to vegetables. “But you could get up.”

“What Jane means is you've worn the same sweatpants for three days again, and you hadn't done that in months,” Darcy filled in bluntly. “So I grabbed the kale and–shit.”

Thor grinned. “Kale?” he asked. “Is it kale?”

This was how Jane and Darcy were dealing with helping Thor who, for the six months since Malekith took both his brother and mother, had not exactly been himself: They kept him “busy,” as Jane said. Well, they did that, and they listened with perhaps genuine interest when he went on and on about Frigga or, more often, his enigmatic brother.

Thor was mostly fine, now. It had been six months. He'd begun working with the Avengers, when he wasn't on Asgard. He'd been avoiding Odin, and avoiding any semblance of princely duties, and that meant … more time and space to clear his head.

He was mostly fine, most of the time.

“No points,” Darcy grumbled. “I'm getting another one.” She got up and left the room with her kale.

Jane took Darcy's place at the end of the tangled bed, and picked up one of the stuffed animals she still kept there in spite of her new, semi-permanent bedfellow. It was a—“gecko”? Thor thought it was a “gecko.” She handed it to him. “She's right, you know,” Jane said. “About the sweatpants.”

“I know,” Thor replied. He drummed his fingers on the old book in his lap, then put it to the side of the bed where there was a stack of Asgardian tomes. He had begun reading the books Loki had liked best, in life, based upon the recommendations of the old Asgardian palace librarian Tindal. Tindal had been, Thor had discovered, one of Loki's closest associates. In the last six months, Thor had become friends with him.

“I'll get up,” Thor said.

“I thought today we could go to the flea market,” Jane said as Thor began hunting around the clothes-strewn floor for a pair of jeans. “It's like a street market? With a bunch of people selling useless nonsense and food that’s delicious and bad for you. Darcy wants to look at some jewelry stand, and I always like to talk to the salespeople, some of them are old and just adorable, and you, you might like candied walnuts, I was thinking you'd like candied walnuts. But if you don't like candied walnuts, there's also usually places that sell vintage guns, and, you know, other manly historical items like that, not that you would understand the history behind them without asking, I mean, obviously … ”

“You're babbling, a little bit!” came Darcy's voice, muffled, perhaps because her head was inside the refrigerator hunting for a new vegetable for Thor to identify.

“... I am,” Jane said to Thor. “Sorry.”

Thor smiled as he pulled on a T-shirt. “You know I like it,” he said. Jane smiled back.

Then Darcy appeared once more in the doorway, this time holding up a bag with something yellow and vaguely oblong. “Alright, tell me what this is, and I might not force you to identify anything at the flea market. They sell vegetables there, too, you know.”

Thor stared at the strange, fleshy piece of produce. He searched his memory for some inkling that he had ever seen the thing before, and came up empty. “This one is unknown to me, I am afraid,” he said.

Darcy put the hand that wasn't holding the vegetable aloft on her hip. “No, it isn’t,” she said. “I told you what it was when we were in the store.”

Thor stared.

“I made up a mnemonic,” Darcy prompted.

Thor shrugged, at a loss.

“I sang a song,” Darcy tried once more. She thrust the plant toward his face, as if proximity would jog his memory.

“Perhaps I was not listening,” Thor suggested reasonably. “Or perhaps I can only remember the names of so many new Midgardian things per day.”

Darcy shook her head at him, and Thor responded with his most charming smile. It wasn’t that Thor didn’t understand the necessity of his learning these Midgardian details. It was just that he rather imagined he would learn these things eventually one way or another, and that vegetable quizzes and flashcards with cartoon versions of Midgardian animals were not entirely necessary.

Sometimes he daydreamed about taking Darcy on vacation to Asgard just to turn the tables. But then, of course, there weren’t flashcards in Asgard. And a cartoon bildgesnipe would be something of a travesty.

“So, the flea market?” Jane chirped from her seat on the bed. She was now cuddling both the “gecko” and the “teddy-bear.”

Thor tried to look conciliatory. “I”–

“Nope, no, nope,” Darcy said, shaking her head and leaning against the bedroom door frame. “I know what you're going to say. You've got some new idea about someone who might have memories about Loki to give you, and you've got to run off to Asgard again. Or you need another book. Or something. That's all fine and good, until it sends you back to bed for three days. You're going to the flea market.”

Thor glanced at Jane.

“I think maybe it could be good for you to take a break,” Jane agreed, looking apologetic.

“It was 'squash,' by the way,” Darcy's voice came from the kitchen, and Thor glanced up to see she was gone again.

“So, what is it you've got to do today?” Jane asked.

Thor hesitated, and glanced up at the doorway to ensure Darcy was still not within earshot. “I think I've worked out a dark path to Muspelheim from that little book Kvasir lent me,” he said quietly, still petting the cat in Jane's lap. “It's probably the easiest to access of the dark paths I’ve learned about so far. Loki figured it out quite young, most likely. Around the time … around the time we both started shield training, maybe. Kvasir said it was just a few decades before that when Loki first began to pester him.”

Jane kept her eyes down. “That's great,” she said. “I'm glad you're getting the hang of … that. Just be careful. I'd imagine they're called 'dark paths' for a reason?” She looked up and smiled nervously.

Thor nodded. “I could call them 'secret paths,' if it would make you feel better.”

But before Jane could answer, her cell phone chirped. 

A moment later she handed it to Thor. “It’s Steve,” she said simply.

“Greetings, Steve,” Thor said warmly, if still a little uncertain–phones were an oddly limiting technology–into the fiber-glass box.

“Thor, hi,” came Steve’s even voice. “Look, I’m sorry to launch into it like this, but—are you sitting down?”

Thor frowned “Yes,” he lied.

“Good. I have to tell you something. It’s something you’re not going to like. But we have a situation, and we need you down here to help us figure it out.”

Steve’s tone rather reminded Thor of the way Jane talked to him when he was getting too angry at something, and forgot to calm himself down, or when his doubts took him to a particularly dark place. The tone was peculiar to Midgard, and Thor had come to like it; from Jane, it meant he was loved and cared for. “Of course, Steve,” he said.

“Good. Okay. So. There’s a man in Times Square right now, in New York City. He’s holding about five hundred people hostage. He’s got hold of some … powerful intergalactic weapons, or something. He calls them—what was it, Bruce? … Right. 'Infinity gems.' He’s already torn up a city block. He's got a pile of bodies–and zoo animals, he's–well, look, Thor. Here's the part you're not going to like. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“He looks exactly like your brother. I mean, a dead ringer. And claims to be your brother, to be ‘Loki, of Asgard.’ If you hadn’t told me yourself that Loki was dead, then I would … Well, I would say it’s Loki. And he says he'll only talk to you.”

A shockwave of confusion and uncertainty went off wordlessly in Thor's mind before he had even quite processed Steve's words.

Then a small part of Thor, which he had hoped was gone, whispered: _I told you he wasn't dead_. Thor didn't know whether that was a function of the usual grief stage of “denial” (Darcy had made him read about the various stages), or a result of the distrust Thor still felt deep down toward his dead brother, in spite of his best efforts to learn understanding and the benefit of the doubt.

Either way, he squashed the thought.

“It cannot be,” Thor said firmly. “I will come and set right this situation. But tell me again, what was the location called? Time Square?”

Steve hesitated before answering straight. “It’s a kind of big-deal human destination,” Steve said. “In terms of putting on a show, it’s something like choosing the palace of Asgard as the stage for your hostage-taking performance.”

The voice in Thor's head began to whisper once more. The man looks like Loki. And certainly sounds like he acts like Loki … well, like Loki had acted for a time, at the worst of times ... Over the last six months, Thor had developed a habit of thinking of his brother as three people: Loki before Thor's botched coronation, Loki during his stint as a King and as a would-be conqueror of Midgard, and Loki after his imprisonment. Two good Lokis. Only one bad—or, not bad. Doing bad, Thor reminded himself.

But whether you called it bad, or “doing bad,” this was that Loki. Even though Loki, and all his incarnations, had lay on the rocks of Alfheim and bled to death as Thor watched. Even though Loki had thrown himself over Jane to protect her when fighting broke out between Thor, Loki and the elves that day. Even though Loki had put himself in danger to rescue Thor as Kursed bore down upon him, and paid for it with his life.

Even though Loki had _never_ been as innately wicked as many had believed him to be, had _insisted_ that he was. Thor was almost sure of it.

A sense of dissonance left Thor wishing he could go back to bed.

“I’ll be right there,” he said into the phone, moving toward the door.

“Thanks, Thor,” Steve said. “I know it must be … confusing, hearing this.”

Thor called his armor from the _bryjoda_ as he crossed the living room. “Just tell me where to meet you,” he said.

~*~

Jane drove Thor to the bifrost site at speeds not strictly legal, but, as it turned out, her expedience was fruitless–distressingly, Heimdall did not respond. But Thor would have to think about that later.

Which was why it took Thor just under three hours, flying with Mjolnir, to find himself circling above Times Square and taking in the scene.

It was not good; it was, in fact, not so different from any of the super-villain attacks Thor had helped the Avengers face in the last six months. Except, perhaps, it was a bit more elaborate and of a larger scale.

Two rows of police cars with flashing lights enclosed each of the streets that led into the large, wedge-shaped area known as “Times Square.” Thor could see, as he flew over each street, that EMS vehicles and tac-vested police officers–some with sniper rifles, others with megaphones–crammed onto the streets between the police car barriers. There were even U.S. Military tanks standing ready to fire in some of the larger side streets.

Gawkers and news media vans had gathered on the far side of each avenue, behind the second row of police cars. Men and women craned to get a look past the EMS vehicles and into the Square.

Times Square itself was encased in a shimmering, barely-there sort of light, and even if Thor had never been a magic user, he could recognize an energy shield when he saw one. He wondered briefly how many mortals had tried to pass through the shield and been shocked violently before the police took control of the situation, and whether any of them had died.

None of that, though, was the worst part.

The worst part was what was _within_ the energy shield. The Loki look-alike–as Thor decided to call him–had given himself a stage, and an audience.

All across Times Square, on streets and sidewalks, were what must have been five or six hundred people. And, as Thor swooped over the scene, they did not move. They remained frozen in place, as if some magic had made human statues of them.

Thor found himself searching his memory for whether that had ever been one of Loki's tricks– _spells_ , rather–but he shut the thought process down. At this stage, there was no reason to believe that this was Loki's doing.

Puzzlingly, among these human statues were other frozen creatures: Exotic animals, many of which Thor could not identify despite Darcy's training. One was a woolly mammoth. There appeared to be an entire pack of lion cubs dotting the Square.

And, at the base of a long, thin building that bisected the Square, there stood a dome-shaped pile of bodies– _human bodies_ –about the size of Jane's small New Mexico dwelling.

The Loki look-alike was using it as a stage. When Thor squinted, he could make out a lone, green, mobile figure moving over the bodies. It seemed to be creating a fireworks display, which was going off in purple, green, and black within the confines of the energy shield.

Thor was uncomfortably reminded of the time Loki had let a ravenous bilgesnipe into a tavern on Vanaheim in order to prove to Thor, Sif and the Warriors Three that he could defeat it without a single casualty. He had, of course, but with more close-calls that most people would have been able to stomach; Loki was merely smug, afterward.

_… Or had he been? Perhaps he–_

This was not the time for any of this.

Parked down one of the streets was a Quinjet, and it was here that Thor chose to land.

Sure enough, the Avengers were assembled.

Most of them stood in a tight, nervous group near the energy shield, seeming to confer. Thor wondered whether they were speaking ill of Loki, and had to fight the impulse to verify that they were not.

Steve Rogers stood a few yards away from the other Avengers, himself speaking with Director Fury and two men in suits, one man rumpled and wearing a bullet-proof vest and an earpiece, the other vibrating with an energy and dangling a megaphone from two fingers as he spoke. Steve also held a megaphone, though it looked less like it belonged in his hands.

The white strobe lights of EMS vehicles and the blue-and-red pulse of police cars made the whole scene flicker in the wan afternoon light. It put Thor in mind of the police procedurals Darcy watched sometimes. The climactic scenes would often be bathed in such dramatic, flickering blue and red light.

Steve, Fury, the two suited men, and Tony Stark, his armor glinting rhythmically, all turned and approached Thor as he landed with a thump.

“Glad you didn’t rush,” Steve said just as Tony called:

“Jesus, if I'd known you'd be this long I'd've sent a jet for you.”

Thor strode toward them as well, ignoring both remarks. “Let me speak to this blasted imposter.” 

Steve glanced at Tony. Tony gestured expansively for him to go ahead. Steve glanced at the energetic man with a megaphone, who nodded several times.

“Thor,” Steve began again. “He says he has demands, but no matter what we say he won't tell them to anyone but you. We need you to talk to him.”

“Demands in exchange for what?” Thor asked, by now having gotten the hang of Midgardian supervillanious tendencies.

“Releasing the hostages,” Steve growled. “The five hundred-odd people he's frozen in there like ice sculptures.”

Thor raised an eyebrow at Steve's choice of image but said nothing.

“Do you know how to work one of these?” the megaphone man asked, proffering Thor the device.

Thor glanced questioningly at Steve.

“Thor, this is Agent Harris,” Steve said. “He's an FBI negotiator. This is what he's trained to do.”

“And a rewarding job that must be, chatting with madmen,” Tony muttered.

Thor took the megaphone. “I am aware it amplifies the voice,” he said.

Harris stepped forward and took Thor by the arm, guiding him toward a strange metal contraption and showing him how to use the megaphone and talking fast.

“This guy wants attention, that much is obvious,” Harris said in a Midgardian accent Thor couldn't identify. “So we give it to him. Listen to what he has to say, wait him out, be patient, just keep him talking. That's always number one, for me, first rule they teach you when you learn to talk to these guys, keep them talking if you can, and this is easy, no problem, we know exactly what he wants, he wants to be seen and heard.”

Thor had to agree that sounded like Loki.

He nodded once.

They reached the metal contraption, which had a long, ladder-like protrusion that ended in a basket large enough for two men, and Harris gestured to a woman in a yellow hat who seemed to be in control of it. The basket moved and settled near Thor.

That's when Thor looked up.

Behind Harris, in the square, mounted on the building above the body stage was a massive screen. It showed the face of the green-clad little figure as it stepped across limbs and on skulls, conducting the fireworks orchestra.

And it was Loki. It … looked exactly like Loki. Older, perhaps, and thinner. But definitely Loki. Right down to the slightly manic grin that Thor could remember from Loki's last visit to this very city.

The old impulse to seek guidance from Odin flickered across his mind, mocking him as he realized that this was neither possible nor, if it were possible, so good an idea as he had long believed it to be.

The dissonance was back, anger and confusion and hope clashing, and Thor once again felt his energy draining rapidly. He was … not up to this. Would his past mock him and follow him no matter where he went upon the Nine Realms, never giving him peace to untangle his future? Where was he safe from these memories, if not on simple Midgard, with Jane?

He put a hand over his eyes to block out the face that looked like Loki's, and the crazed green figure he could see moving atop the body stage.

“Thor,” Steve's voice came again from nearby. “I know this is probably hard. But we need you to talk to him. We need to diffuse this situation. He's killed however many people he's standing on, though we don't know who they are or where they came form. And he keeps … teleporting people and … zoo animals into his magical pen, there. He's doing some strange things to them. All those lion cubs were adults this morning. The mammoth was an elephant.”

Thor nodded, and lifted his head again. Harris explained the metal contraption to Thor–it would raise him up in the air to be on a level with Loki–and Thor stepped into the basket. A moment later, he was ascending.

The green-clad figure took notice of this, the fireworks ceased, and the Loki facsimile’s eyes were on Thor.

“Thor!” came a voice that boomed like a baseball announcer’s in a stadium. “You came!”

Thor looked down at the megaphone in his hand and tried to remember how it worked.

“... Yes,” he managed to say into it after a moment. His voice came out amplified, but nothing like as loud as Loki's; the gawkers at the end of the street could probably hear Loki. “I am here.” Thor swallowed, his mouth suddenly too dry. “What ... is this?”

“This is my attempt to do right, Thor,” the Loki look-alike replied, face earnest. “I want to relinquish five weapons of extreme power to the Midgardian governments. I've been giving them a show of how powerful they are.” The look-alike grinned. “Do you like the show?”

Thor tried not remember whether that manic gleam had been in Loki's eyes in the tavern on Vanaheim, or a thousand other times before and after in their lives together.

“... What weapons do you speak of?” Thor managed finally.

The fascimile held out his arm to Thor, and Thor realized that he wore a golden gauntlet. “This,” he said, his eyes widening.

That's when Thor remembered what Steve had said on the phone– “Infinity Gems.”

On Loki's forearm was a piece of golden and leather armor that Thor recognized from his trips over the years to the weapons vault in Asgard. The Infinity Gauntlet. It had sat locked up for thousands of years, since an ancient Asgardian king discovered it on a distant planet in a war that Thor could not remember the name of.

The six Infinity Gems each held power over some element of existence. And when they were combined in the Gauntlet, well ... They were supposed to bring the wearer omnipotence. Thor had always, in his youth, wondered why Odin never sought the Gems since he already had the Gauntlet, and he winced to remember those thoughts.

In more recent years, Asgard had come to possess two of the Gems–the Tesseract, or Space Gem; and the Aether, or Reality Gem. They hadn't been exactly Gem-shaped, and Thor had asked Odin about that; apparently, they could take any form their user wanted them to.

Loki's Gauntlet gleamed with five little points of multicolored light. When in their original forms, the Space Gem was meant to be … blue? Purple? The Reality gem … Yellow? Orange?

All four of those colors were represented, though Thor couldn't remember exactly which gem was which. A red gem also gleamed from one knuckle. Only green was absent. 

Thor felt himself suddenly to be massively out of his depth, and it was his own fault. Most days of his youth, during his and Loki's private history lessons, he had spent the time pretending to take notes but, in fact, sketching fantastical and impractical weaponry on the reverse side of his vellum. Once, when Loki informed Odin of this, the King had encouraged Thor with a chuckle.

Thor wished, for the thousandth time, that he had spent certain parts of his youth differently.

“You've … you've come to _give Midgard_ the _Infinity Gauntlet_?” Thor replied at length. “That doesn't sound likely, no matter who you are.”

The look-alike cocked his head. “You do not believe I am your _brother_ , Thor?” it asked.

“No,” Thor replied. “My brother died.”

The look-alike grinned. “Oh, Thor,” it said. “You think there is no way that I, Loki, could seem to die one day and appear here another? Am I not called the God of Mischief? The silvertongue, the liesmith, the Trickster God?”

Well, Thor though. When Loki put it that way. “I …” Thor realized he wasn't speaking into the megaphone, and put it to his lips again. “I knelt beside you,” he said. “As you died.”

“And, if you recall, you'd done that twice before, during tricks we played in … I believe it was once in Nidavellir, and once in the Realm Below, when none of the Warriors were around.”

A chill pricked at Thor's arms. “We … did play those tricks,” he said, feeling a bit like he was losing his grip on a raft in deep water. “But anyone could have gotten that information from Loki, while he lived.”

Loki stood, expressionless, amidst the gleaming buildings and atop the pile of bloodied bodies.  
He grinned again and raised one hand. “Here,” he said. “I'll prove it to you.”

The air above Loki's frozen audience shimmered and shifted with warm, swirling colors. After a moment, the colors resolved into an image.

Frigga. Young and smiling, a stargazer lily tucked behind one ear, seen as if from below. By children.

“You must leave old Cavel alone,” she said in a low, amused voice that echoed through the Square but did not boom, was more delicate than that. “He … needs the extra money he makes that way. Your father cannot raise the kitchen's wages.”

“But it isn't his!” came a young voice. The image shifted to show a small, blond boy. Thor. “He's _stealing_. And he smells.”

“I can't imagine how it matters whether he smells,” Frigga said, and the image shifted to her again. She suppressed a smile, no longer looking down at the boys. Her head bobbed a bit, as if she were walking. “And you're right, of course, it isn't”–

Thor stopped listening.

“Stop this, Loki,” Thor commanded into the megaphone. “Take Frigga down from there.”

The image shimmered, and was gone.

“Didn't want to hear yourself insult the old smuggler anymore, Thor?” Loki asked, eyes wide and innocent. “He's dead now, you know.”

“Loki,” Thor said in greeting. Loki smiled, and his eyes narrowed.

Thor felt better, now. He wanted to pummel Loki. It was a much more familiar feeling. Much more comfortable and actionable. He no longer felt tired.

Though he found the images in his head tended more toward thrashing Loki and then tying him to a chair so Thor could shout at him, than toward thrashing Loki and then throwing him in a cell so Thor could be done with him.

“What are you doing?” Thor asked heavily. “Why are you standing on a _pile of bodies_?”

Loki looked down. “Oh, this?” he asked. He looked back up, still grinning. “This. This is … not real.”

And with that, the image of the green-clad figure atop a pile of bloodied bodies glowed and resolved itself into only a green-clad figure, standing atop a small building in the center of the square. The screen with Loki's face also disappeared.

Loki looked suddenly much smaller and more … vulnerable. He wasn't wearing his helmet. He was, in fact, dressed in much the same way he had been while imprisoned in Asgard.

Thor had a sudden and intense memory of the warm, ticklish feeling of blood creeping to pool around his knees as he knelt beside Loki on Svartalfheim.

“What are your demands, Loki?” he barked. “What do you want for the Infinity Gems? Dominion?”

Loki shook his head. “Of course not,” he said. His voice still boomed, but he sounded somehow sincere. Which of course may or may not be real. “That would be a kind of blackmail, would you not agree? No. I want something much smaller.” Here, Loki paused, and looked almost nervous. The hand that did not bare the Gantlet went to the edge of his green tunic and gripped it tightly.

Thor was at pains to remind himself that while Loki, all things considered, was almost certainly playing at something, he should not assume anything. He should remember to give Loki the benefit of the … doubt.

With a twinge of regret, he recalled Loki's twisted, angry face as Thor shouted at him on that hilltop just after Thor came to Midgard to confront Loki about the Chitauri. How many times, over the last six months, had Thor wondered how he might have approached Loki differently that night? And yet here Thor was, doing the same thing again.

“Pardon,” Loki went on finally, bringing Thor back to himself. “I want pardon. I wish to be cleared of all crimes against Midgard, and given the full freedom afforded to yourself to move about the various parts of this realm, should I chose to. I of course promise in advance not to commit any Midgardian crimes.”

Certainly, there was more to it than that, Thor thought. Something in Loki's phrasing that would mean his wish, as granted, would give him much more than it seemed to.

But Thor could not find the trick.

And that was beside the fact that, obviously, Loki's word could not be trusted.

 _Stop it_ , he admonished himself. _He may well be telling the truth. Even if he only appeared to die for me, he did nearly die for Jane. Had I not saved him myself from that gravity grenade …_

“And if we refuse?” Thor said.

“Well then I'll have to go on 'demonstrating' the power of the Gems, here and at other Midgardian monuments, until someone accepts it.”

“Have you hurt anyone with your demonstrations, Loki?” Thor growled.

“Not yet,” Loki replied, grinning. “And I don't want to. But you can understand the position I'm in. You've got to take them. And that's my only leverage.”

And that's when Thor realized he didn't understand nearly anything about this situation.

“Loki, where did you get five Infinity Gems?” he asked suddenly, as the sheer amount of power in front of him–if Loki was telling the truth–began to register.

“I collected them from various sources,” Loki said lightly. “I would not expect you to understand the power of research. Myself and another dark sorcerer discovered their locations, and sought them out. The other dark sorcerer I have killed, after realizing that our intention to take over the Nine Realms was misguided. I now want only for the Gems to be safe from those would use them to do evil.”

Thor almost laughed, surveying the tableau around them. “This was perhaps not the way to convey such a message,” he said.

“It got me the meetings I wanted,” Loki said coolly. “Now will you kindly ask the international organization which is present here today–the cleverly named 'Shield'–whether they would like to take possession of the Gems? It's hot out and I'd like to take this Gauntlet off.”

“Loki, the Gems will not be safe on Midgard,” Thor said. “You must know that. This realm is not equipped”–

“Nor is it on the map,” Loki cut in. “No one thinks of Midgard, who is not _on_ Midgard, save your esteemed self. No threat keeps up with news of the planet of mortals. Since the Aether came to Asgard, there have been no fewer than three attempts by unsavory forces to break into the weapon's vault. All eyes are on Asgard. None on Midgard.”

The argument made a kind of sense, though it ignored a slew of other potentialities. But perhaps “a kind of sense” was the most that Loki was capable of making. He still did not seem sane. He hadn’t for some time.

Thor felt a pang as all the romanticized trust he had began to put in the memory of his dead brother over the last six months was assaulted by a wave of vivid memories: That bilgesnipe in the tavern; Loki showing off flame magic in the streets of a village made mostly of wood; the message to Bredtre; then … Jotenheim. The Chitauri.

He felt as if he'd misplaced something important, despite the fact that Loki was apparently _alive_ after all.

All at once, as if Thor's lingering hope to trust Loki had kept the question at bay, Thor found himself asking the only thing that, in Thor's heart of hearts, he was _really_ wondering about.

“Does the Allfather believe the Gems should be removed from Asgard?” Thor asked. Though he was certain he already knew the answer.

Loki's smile faltered, but Thor could only imagine that was by design. “No,” Loki said. “But if you'll recall, the last time you and I did something that went against the wishes of the _Allfather_ , it was your idea. And it resulted in your saving the universe.”

The impulse to automatically tell Loki off for defying father broke against Thor, and he weathered it. It passed.

Thor tried to think through the fog of fear that permeated his mind at the notion of defying his father. Knowing father would not agree with Loki, could Thor agree to Loki's terms? What would father do, if he knew Loki and Thor had worked together to keep Infinity Gems from Asgard, based upon reasons of their own?

Thor did not know. After he kidnapped Jane from Asgard, and defeated Malekith, father had been surprisingly lenient. Shockingly lenient, if Thor was honest with himself. Thor was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the punishment to come. Could he add to his list of crimes against Odin? How long before father realized Thor was no longer interested in unquestioning obedience, and sent someone to Midgard to put him in a cell, too?

But no. No. Thor was not a pawn, not a child. He could stand up to father. He had been telling himself as much for six months.

Perhaps Loki was right, and Thor merely could not see it because he knew it defied Odin's wishes.

Then again, perhaps Loki really was scheming something.

Thor fingered the handle of Mjolnir, wishing there was something he could do with it. This was exactly the kind of decision he had hoped to avoid making, until he was a far wiser man, by abdicating the throne. Perhaps some day he would be up to such complex calculations. That day was not today.

But as Thor stood there considering, Loki twitched his wrist, and Thor was hit with a wave of realization.

Suddenly he knew that Loki was probably telling the truth. About the sorcerer. About the Gems being safer here. About having good intentions.

The sense of loss began to fade as it dawned on Thor: Loki was here, alive, and he wasn't necessarily up to no good.

The realization was rather abrupt. Like magic.

But it was nice.

“I will take your demand to Shield, brother,” he said, fighting the wave of emotion to keep his voice steady. “It is not unreasonable. You will not cause any further trouble while we consult?”

“Of course not,” Loki replied. He flicked his wrist, and the animals all disappeared. “I have even restored the zoo's population, as a show of good faith.”

“Thank you, brother,” Thor said.

Loki smiled wanly and Thor felt himself return the expression.

Thor glanced down. Harris made a hand signal to the woman who stood at the controls for the metal contraption, and Thor descended.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Avengers must decide what to do about Loki.

It was not, of course, easy to convince all necessary parties to accept Loki's proposal.

Director Fury, Tony, and Natasha were fairly sure the best plan was to _tell_ Loki they accepted the deal, take the Gauntlet, and then imprison the rogue Asgardian.

Steve thought that was dishonorable, and likely to come back to bite them. Thor professed agreement with Steve, but really just didn't want Loki captured.

Bruce figured that Fury’s plan was probably what Loki expected and wanted, and that really there was no good decision they could possibly make, and that the Earth might be a little bit doomed.

Clint, who looked like a volcano straining not to erupt, was of the firm belief that Shield and the U.S. Military had not tried hard enough yet to _take_ the Gauntlet by force.

“Four M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks weren't enough force for you?” Tony asked.

“First of all it's scary you can just name the make and model of tanks like that. Second, I still say we could try a missile strike–”

“ _Not_ while there are hostages,” Steve cut in.

“More people will _die_ , long-term, if we let sexy Penn and Teller out into the world,” Clint said. “Five hundred casualties, compared to what he did last time, when he had free reign–”

“This is non-negotiable, from my point of view,” Harris interjected swiftly, glancing at the other suited mortal, who nodded belatedly. “We're not using any force that could harm the hostages.”

“Well, what about you, Thor?” Clint turned those penetrating eyes on him. “You're from the same god damned planet as your prissy fucking brother. How do we get through that sci-fi field?”

One strike from Mjolnir, Thor thought. Done it a thousand times.

“Such fields are nearly impenetrable, unless assaulted by overwhelming force on the scale Steve and Mr. Harris have rejected,” Thor said aloud.

“Well, that’s that,” Steve said as Clint balled his hands into fists and glared at Thor like it was his fault–which, strictly speaking, it was, since he was lying. “We can't get in. And we've been here all day with the best people negotiating with him and ended up exactly nowhere. I think we've got to take this deal. But I tell ya'. If he hands that thing over, and he behaves well like he says he will, we can't go back on our end of this.”

“Whoa, there, Cap,” Tony said, raising his metal hands in surprise. “That's a bit of a leap of logic, don't you think? We can't bomb the terrorist, so, oh, I know, we'll cooperate with him.”

“He is not a terrorist,” Thor said, gritting his teeth. “He is my brother, and he was doing … much better, before we lost contact again.”

“You mean before he pretended to die?” Tony asked.

Thor stepped toward him, feeling the weight of Mjolnir in his hand, but Steve's arm appeared between them, and Thor backed up.

“No need for that,” Steve said. “Thor, I'm on your side. I think we should do what he asks. And”–he looked at Tony–“I don't make this decision lightly. But think about it. He's offering us something pretty amazing. And I guess it turns out he hasn’t even hurt anyone, this time. It looks to me like he's asking for a second chance, in his particular way."

Thor blinked at Steve. “Thank you, my friend,” he said.

“No problem.”

"Do I need to get out the New York Times 'Tribute to those who fell in New York' issue for you to remember what he did, Cap?" Tony asked. "Because I can call it up on my mobile, here."

"And what about all the people your weapons killed?" Steve asked. "Will you show me a retrospective on them?"

Thor didn't know much about this particular part of Tony's history–something having to do with Midgardian wartime economics, and the morality thereof–but he did know that the issue was something of a sore one for the Man of Iron.

Tony's eyes practically bugged out of his head. "Look, Steve, I _know_ ," he said. "But how is that comparable?"

"What kinds of atrocities we're complicit with and how we're complicit with them is cultural, and personal," Steve answered. "It would be hypocritical of this team to refuse Loki a second chance. We could probably change our name to Team Second Chance. Every single one of us has gotten a second chance to be better than we thought we could ever be, in one way or another. If we can apply to ourselves and each other such a flexible version of justice, why not someone else? Thor vouches for Loki. I trust Thor. And I believe in second chances."

"Why don't we just give every murderer who looks remorseful at his trial a second chance, then?" Tony asked. "One of them could be the next Mother Theresa, or the next Bill Gates. We can't possibly just put them in prison because they killed somebody. They _feel_ bad."

Steve's lips pressed together, and he looked at Tony in a way he hadn't looked at him in months, the same way he'd looked at him on the helicarrier before the invasion. Back when Tony hadn't seemed to be able to do anything but insult people and make light of the situation. "Do _not_ take the moral high ground just because the bad things you've done are sanctioned by a system," Steve said. "You're better than that. Or at least, sometimes you are."

Tony shut his mouth, stared for a second, and then opened it again. "Okay, you're making me feel like I'm wrong, but I'm still pretty sure I'm right," Tony said. He pushed something on the screen of his handheld device and held it up. The "New York Times" victim retrospective displayed above it, floating there in the air between the two men.

"All I'm saying," Steve said, taking a step forward and not taking his eyes off Tony's, "is if the rules don't apply to us, why do they apply to him? If he belongs in jail–and maybe he does–then so do you, Natasha, Clint, and Bruce."

"Possibly also me," Thor put in. Steve glanced at him sidelong, and nodded in thanks. Thor nodded back.

"I think Director Fury would agree with me, if his mind wasn't, uh, clouded by his lust after those baubles," Tony said evenly. "This isn't abstract. This is–"

"Threat mitigation?" Steve asked. "Like a nuclear deterrent? Or like stockpiling Stark weapons tech?"

"No, threat mitigation like making sure there's enough coolant in your nuclear reactor."

"He's a sentient being, not a nuclear reactor," Steve said.

"Hitler, was a sentient being," Tony returned.

Steve continued to look at Tony appraisingly. "Okay, tell me this," he said. "In your analogy, what's the coolant?"

"What's the–oh. Containment. Of Loki. Putting him back in a cell, somewhere he can't hurt anyone. That's the coolant."

"That seems to have gone great the first time," Steve replied. "Try this on for size, huh? What if the coolant is a second chance? How do you know it's not?"

Tony snorted. "You've got a lot of faith in decency, Cap," he said. "You'll excuse me if I don't share it."

"And you've got a lot of faith in violence," Steve returned. "You'll excuse me, if I don't share _that_."

Tony shook his head. "Maybe you're right, up to a point," he said. "But somewhere, there's gotta be a line. I think six thousand people is over any reasonable idea about where the line should be."

"So what do you want to do?" Steve asked. "Fight him here in the streets? See how many civilian casualties we can rack up before he beats us because he's got intergalactic super jewelry? He made a car disappear. I get the distinct impression we're still standing here because he's allowing it."

Most of the Avengers nodded grudgingly, save for Clint, who shook his head but said nothing. Tony looked around at them like a man who knew he was beaten.

“Fine,” he said. “Clearly, I have no control over this situation. But I'm big enough to say, hey, I'll be there when we've got to fight him again. No sweat.”

Steve's features remained carefully neutral.

Fury was rather easier to persuade, probably–Thor thought–because he was ready to agree to anything that ended with the Gauntlet in a Shield facility.

The rumpled man who had been consulting with Steve and Fury when Thor arrived turned out to be a figure Thor had seen on television before, now that he thought about it: The American Secretary of Homeland Security. He seemed mostly to be out of his depth and terrified, and said little, though he did seem displeased by the idea of letting Shield take possession of the Gauntlet. He feared that this would make “the administration look weak,” which admittedly should always be a concern for a nation but should not be quite so primary among the man's considerations, in Thor's opinion.

Eventually the Secretary placed a call to the American President, and returned with instructions to let Shield have the Gauntlet after all, if the Avengers, the Department, and Shield did in fact agree to accept Loki's bargain.

The President also strongly recommended that the Secretary listen very carefully to whatever Captain America had to say.

After that the Secretary pulled Harris and Director Fury to the side to have a humans-only chat, and the American government capitulated to Steve's–Thor's–plan.

Which left Tony Stark as the only remaining vocal objector to the plan as it now stood, and Thor found it none too difficult to ignore him. Everyone else was.

Which is how it came to pass that, as the sun began to set, Thor was once again raised aloft in the metal contraption.

“This is insane,” came Tony's voice from below him. “Thor, this is the guy who suggested all of humanity kneel. The guy who allowed himself to be _captured and imprisoned_ just to play with our heads.” Tony glanced around. “Natasha, tell him, last chance.”

The Black Widow shook her head. “Not my area,” she said. “Magic 'n monsters.”

“Clint?” Tony tried.

“I'm buying a bunker in China,” Hawkeye replied, arms crossed. “Or South Africa.”

“That's … not a bad idea,” Tony replied. “But not all that helpful.”

Thor smiled down at the Iron Man. “I appreciate your input,” he said jovially.

Tony quirked an eyebrow as Thor rose further into the air, and Thor turned away from him.

Loki was lounging, having at some point conjured a briefcase sized tome, which he was now reading atop the small building. “Loki,” Thor called through the megaphone. “We've accepted your offer.”

Loki's head snapped up and, for a moment, he looked immensely relieved, lips parted and brow smooth.

Then he smiled a chilly smile, and nodded.

The energy shield dissolved, and the people frozen in the streets of Times Square let out little cries of surprise and clutched at themselves in confusion. Police officers and EMS people streamed forward to apprise them of what they'd just gone through.

Loki stood, the divan and tome disappearing, took one step forward, and–

Then he was at the base of the metal contraption, a few feet from Director Fury, the smile still fixed on his face. Clint, Bruce, and the Secretary of The Department of Homeland Security all jumped and backed slightly away.

“Hello, Thor,” Loki said, glancing up. Then he turned back to Director Fury. “This is for you.”

And, with no fuss at all, he unlaced the Infinity Gauntlet and handed it to the eye-patched man.

“Well, thanks, Reindeer Games,” Tony said. “I sure hope a bunch of Mediterranean soldiers don't jump out of there tomorrow.”

“Ah yes, I have heard that tale,” Loki answered inscrutably. “Clever, Iron Man.”

“Ten points to Slytherin,” Tony replied.

But Tony was walking away now, going after Director Fury, who had shot away from Loki the moment the Gauntlet was in his hands.

Both men made it to the middle of Times Square and Thor became aware of a low hum getting louder by the second. A moment later a helicopter swooped to hover above Tony and the Director, and a ladder dropped to the ground.

From his vantage point, Thor watched Tony and Furry have a brief shouting argument which ended in Tony poising to blast the Director and, at the last moment, shutting down his blaster and stalking back toward the other Avengers.

Fury climbed the ladder, and the helicopter took off for the horizon.

“Well that was … expedient,” Loki said as the drone of the helicopter faded.

“Made his escape like a god damned fugitive,” Tony muttered as he drew back up to the group and extracted what looked like a cellular phone from inside a compartment of his suit.

“An apt simile,” Loki agreed wryly.

Just then, Steve finally realized he ought to gesture for the woman in the yellow hat to lower Thor.

When Thor reached the ground, there were no actual thoughts inside his head. He launched himself at Loki. His skinny brother's spine stiffened as Thor embraced him, and he did not relax even as Thor held on.

But it didn't matter.

“You're alive,” Thor said to Loki's shoulder. He pulled away, and peered into Loki's face. “Norns, Loki, what happened to you? How do you live?”

Thor was distantly aware that the other beings present were staring at the two Asgardians, but that didn't matter either.

“Um,” Loki said. He turned his head a bit to regard Thor penetratingly. “Are you quite alright, Thor?” he asked. “You're acting rather … affectionately.” Loki glanced down at where Thor was still gripping Loki's upper arms.

Thor released him and took a step back. “You are of course coming home with me,” Thor said. “To New Mexico. That is where I live with Jane.” Thor recognized that he was beaming like a fool, but did nothing to check it.

The expression of surprise that appeared on Loki's face was out of place; Loki was difficult to catch off guard.

“I–what?” Loki said.

Thor’s smile flickered as he realized that his renewed affection for his brother probably did seem bizarre to Loki: After the contract on Nidavellir, the messenger to Bredtre, the Tasks, Jotenheim, Thor’s banishment and then everything Loki did … things between them had been as cold and hopeless as a Svartalfheim sunset for over a century at a minimum. 

Arguably their best moment together in three hundred years had been when Loki was dying.

“I bare you only good will, Loki,” Thor said more quietly. “I have endeavored to put the past behind me.”

Loki’s face went perfectly still. Something flickered there and then was gone. “Alright, Thor,” Loki said finally, his voice very steady. “If you would like it.”

Thor had expected much more of an argument. But he was not going to ask a dragon for its fire.

Besides! Thor felt as if he had climbed the highest mountain in the Nine Realms. That he should have thought his brother both dead and possibly evil, and now to be here! With his brother alive, doing the right thing, and coming home with him. What would Odin say _now_?

“Like it?!” Thor roared, hefting his arm to slap Loki on the back before remembering that–this was among the things he had realized or figured out about Loki, while Loki was dead–Loki tended to wince when he did that. He sat it gently around Loki's shoulders, instead. “I would be delighted!”

“Thor, are you sure about that?” Clint spoke up. “I didn't think you two were close.”

“We were,” Thor said, turning to Clint and feeling the smile drop. “But then we were torn apart by circumstance, and poor choices all around. Now I have a second chance. I apologize if my exuberance seems strange. The brotherly bond is very important to the Asgardian Old Ways.”

Loki's expression of surprise seemed to have progressed, at this point, to bafflement, though he also looked vaguely pained. Thor removed his arms from Loki's shoulders, fearing that he had hurt him after all.

Loki did not look at Thor and, after a moment, the expression disappeared and was replaced by the blank calm he had projected for most of his life. He stood up a little straighter, seeming to recover from Thor's assault of affection.

“I haven't mind controlled him, if that's what you mean, Agent Barton,” he said quietly. He joined his hands behind his back and it made him look quite sober and trustworthy, if you didn't know him. Clint stared at him, his mouth twisted as if he smelled something rotten. “It is not one of my powers, without the Mind Gem,” Loki went on. “Thor will tell you that.”

“It is not,” Thor confirmed.

Clint did not state what Thor imagined to be the obvious retort–that if Thor were mind controlled, he would say whatever Loki told him to–but instead threw up his hands and stormed away from the situation.

“This is going to be a disaster,” he called over his shoulder. Loki smiled politely at him. “This whole thing. Some unique, spectacular, never-before-seen kind of disaster.” He turned around but continued to move away, walking backwards and waving his arms. “People will die, and that won't even be the worst part.”

Natasha her eyebrows and followed him.

When they were gone, Loki took a breath as if to speak further. Instead, Steve stepped forward to station himself inches away from Loki, and Thor's brother shut his mouth quickly. Thor would have been lying if he had denied that Loki looked a bit intimidated as the more muscular man regarded him.

“Loki,” Steve said evenly. A worry line appeared between Loki's eyes, but he said nothing. “You keep up your end of the deal, and we keep up ours. Do you understand? You break any Midgardian laws, and the deals off. _Any_ Midgardian laws.”

“Any?” Loki said, raising his hands to put them protectively between himself and the Avenger. “Could we not employ a 'three strikes, you're out' system, or something similar? I can't see how maybe just one murder would be so–”

“No,” Steve barked just as Thor frowned and heard himself say,

“Loki.”

Thor was not entirely sure whether Loki was joking. He rather hoped he was.

Loki shut his mouth. Steve went on. “Any laws,” he said. “I mean don't jaywalk. Do you understand?”

Loki seemed about to argue again, but then nodded. “Fine,” he said. “I understand the spirit of what you say, though I can't profess that I know how to jaywalk. I suppose I must brush up.”

“I suppose you must,” Tony said from behind Steve without looking up from his telephonic device. “I think you'll find a few surprises. For example, did you know it's illegal to invade a city with an alien army? It's an international war crime, actually, which are, like, the black belts of crime.”

“That was all just one crime?” Loki asked, cocking his head slightly at Tony. “That is underwhelming.”

“Let's all try not to be glib about thousands of lives, how 'bout that,” Steve said evenly.

“Yes, sensibilities, very sorry,” Loki said recklessly. Steve stared at him with what Thor could only call disappointment.

Loki turned away from Steve. “Anyway, shall we get on with this, then?” he said, searching the faces of the group. “Is there any … What is it? Paperwork? Shall we put it into writing and seal with blood?”

That seemed to close the obligatory period of warning Loki against misbehavior.

There followed a period of T-crossing, with the group repairing to an office building down the street which had apparently been commandeered by Maria Hill and other high-ranking members of Shield. Document were produced, read by all parties, and then signed by Loki, Hill, and the Secretary. Loki swore not to break any Midgardian laws, and not to use magic with malicious or antisocial intent. Natasha also had a specific provision against mind control placed into the contract.

Loki was, further, to report to any Shield facility on the first of every month “just to check in,” as Hill put it; to Thor, it sounded like the Midgardian practice of “parole.” He also was not to leave the country of America without alerting both Shield and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and while the United States was willing to grant Loki a permanent visitor's visa–which sounded like a contradiction–the Secretary informed Loki that he did not think there was any protocol by which he could become a citizen. That Thor had already been granted honorary citizenship no one chose to mention.

And then, after what felt like most of a day but was in fact perhaps four hours, Loki was, as Tony put it, “now clear to move about the Midgard,” which was an odd sentence construction but was otherwise true. Tony and the Secretary went off to do media appearances for the tenacious reporters who remained at the other end of the police blockade.

Unfortunately, when Thor and Loki were escorted to the roof of the office building to call for Heimdall, the Gatekeeper for the second time that day did not respond.

A light breeze blew across the building's flat top and the lights of New York City winked in the evening around them, but the sky remained empty and clear of all energy pulses.

“Must be down for maintenance,” Thor suggested uncertainly, and Loki nodded. This had not happened in centuries, but perhaps the new Bifrost wasn't fully debugged, yet.

Fortunately, Tony was oddly amenable to lending the brothers use of a fully-staffed Stark Industries jet.

~*~ 

Tony Stark sipped the smoky scotch and readjusted his headphones.

It was maybe 3 a.m., not that Tony was paying the time much attention, so the view from his new Malibu balcony was mostly of black ocean blending into black sky. But that was alright. It was a perfectly good place, no matter the time, to toast the probable end of the world as he knew it.

And Tony had a front-row seat, thanks as usual to his own ingenuity.

Nicholas J. Fury might be a spy, and a good one, but he was no match for microtechnology, or Tony Stark. The Director hadn’t suspected a god damned thing when Tony followed him as he departed from Time’s Square with the Gauntlet, buying the idea that Tony just wanted to shout at him and then give up.

Obviously, that is not what Tony had done. What Tony had done was place two tiny listening and tracking devices on the “Infinity Gauntlet” and on Director Furry’s signature overdramatic long black jacket. Tony had been looking for a good time to field test the little things. The likely beginning of the end of the world was as decent a time as any, Tony thought.

Both would last until they met with some extreme force, or they were submerged in water. The technology was just a prototype, after all, so Tony couldn't blame himself that it still had weaknesses.

He was listening, now, to the device planted on Furry. The device on the Gauntlet had gone silent a few hours before, when the Gauntlet was sealed inside an underwater containment facility in the goddamn Atlantic Ocean that Shield had never bothered to mention to the United States Government or, as far as Tony knew, the United Nations.

Already, Tony’s little devices were paying off. Maybe he’d been wrong all these years to focus on bigger, brasher kinds of technology.

… Nah. Both. Both was better. 

But anyway, things were getting really good.

“Agent Hill, I need you to set up a strike team for”—

Fury gave an address in Puente Atigua, the little New Mexico town where Thor lived. It was, in fact, Thor’s address. Tony knew this because he himself had let Shield know that was where Thor and Loki were headed, earlier in the night.

And Tony didn’t feel bad about it. Not at all. Not one bit. It wasn’t Tony’s fault if Thor was trusting enough to let Tony lend him a jet when he was trying to abscond with an international war criminal, thereby revealing to Tony where said international war criminal would be. Or that Thor was trusting enough to take that international war criminal back to a house that was in fact technically owned by an international defense organization.

Anything he could do to help. Tony was _such_ a team player.

The fact that the real benefit to lending Thor the jet was that Tony had his staff place tracking devices on Mjolnir and Loki's clothing, as well, was obviously beside the point.

Also, you know, he didn't feel bad about that, either.

“Affirmative, Director. What are the details?” Agent Hill’s voice came as if over a radio.

“A covert seizure op. We want to capture and question the Black Sheep. The Golden Lion will be hostile to this action, and must be either avoided or dealt with. Hopefully, avoided. Use the Asgardian serums as needed.”

Hill was silent for a few seconds, and Tony found himself half hoping, in spite of himself and his very sound judgment and decision-making processes, that Agent Hill would argue against Furry’s decision to go back on the deal that Loki, Shield, and the United States had made.

“Will you be meeting us?” Hill asked.

“No, Agent,” Fury said. Then he added, in a tone more like speaking to a friend, “I'm busy creating task forces to explore the power of these here new shiny objects. I trust the interrogation team. It will be good to interrogate Loki properly.”

“Roger that,” the Agent answered. She didn’t sound like she liked anything about the situation, but you didn’t get to be a high-ranking member of Shield by only doing the things you liked, Tony reasoned.

So, great. Loki would be interrogated, and unless something happened to the listening device planted on Loki between now and then, Tony could hear that, too.

Hopefully he would hear something that would help him decide how to diffuse this whole situation. Because two things were very wrong. One, Loki was on earth. Even if Shield didn’t intend to honor its promises, that was bad.

Two … seriously, Shield did not need to be in custody of five intergalactic weapons.

To Tony’s mind, that might even be the bigger of the two difficulties, at this point.

And Tony was the only one who seemed to recognize that both these things were problems. Though, come morning, Tony would probably have plenty of politicians, celebrities and world leaders jumping on his side thanks to his less-than-neutral media appearances that day.

He would think about it more in the morning, Tony decided, and he poured another scotch.

“Here’s to the antichrist,” Tony said to the empty balcony, holding the drink up. “Whoever he may be.”

~*~

Once they were on the jet and underway, it took fifteen minutes for Thor to fail completely at leaving Loki to the privacy of his thoughts.

A blue eye appeared in the gap between the two seats in front of Loki. It blinked.

Loki continued to stare at the plastic airplane window shade, and at his own hand holding it firmly closed. He didn't move.

He was too tired for whatever Thor wanted. He didn't need to know _what_ Thor wanted precisely to know that he was too tired for it. Too tired, and with too much on his mind.

He had to _rest_. He _had_ to. He had to make his magic recharge. Certainly, he'd put on an excellent show passing off the Infinity Gauntlet, if he had to say so himself; all the American news media had been there. 

But that was just step one in a rather complex and unpleasant plan. The next step of which – scrying The Channeler again so that he could subtly influence his mind to check his news sources – required more magic than Loki could spare right now. 

Thor spoke despite Loki's clearly signaled reticence. "You look–tired, brother."

Loki laughed before he knew he was going to. "I'd imagine that's something of an understatement."

Thor's eye blinked again. "Are you going to tell me how it is that you are alive, Loki?"

Loki wanted desperately to freeze Thor. But obviously, he couldn’t spare the magic. He was dangerously depleted. He’d done quite a lot in a short time. Putting on today’s show so soon after everything else had left him feeling weaker than perhaps he ever had. His hands would have been shaking if they hadn’t been holding on to the window shade so tightly. Had he needed to immediately walk anywhere farther than a few dozen yards he would not have managed it without frequent rests.

He got tired so easily, these days, after years of sleeping even less than usual. And ever since he'd started using the Reality Gem, he'd found … it was worse. With no anchor but his own magic, it took a toll on him to use these tools.

He looked forward to gaining the Gauntlet and omnipotence because, if nothing else, once he had it, he would feel safe to really rest. He would make things just as he needed them to be, make everything perfect, and then ... He could rest. For as long and as deeply as he wanted.

And on top of that, the result of his depletion was that he was in a Midgardian _flying contraption_ thousands of miles above the ground. If Loki had managed to retain enough magic to portal himself and Thor to New Mexico, then he would absolutely have done it; he may have given up the Gems, including the Space Gem, but the semi-permanent folds in reality he had placed on the Gems and on himself meant that he could reach out and use them at any time, no matter where they were physically located.

"Please leave me alone," was all he managed to say.

Thor's eye hovered for a moment. Loki wasn't sure whether he imagined that it seemed to assess him.

Then it went away.

The silly, science-age thrum of the engine reminded Loki of Nexheim's low, rolling war drums; Loki had been on campaign with the old adviser Kvasir during a small war with that nation over Asgardian immigration, and Kvasir–always one of the few Asgardians who had given Loki any credit–had let Loki come with him to the battlefront.

Loki had learned that day the odd way blood runs in clay dirt, moving over it in rivulets as if over wax, slowly forming thick wet tracks that dried to look like veins.

These and other such pleasant memories would be his company if this plane fell, had been his company as he fell, before, just Loki and his thoughts, alone, dropping entirely unmoored in the suffocating darkness; he'd been a forgotten rag doll, seeing nothing, touching nothing, with no way to stop, no way to gain control, no way even to die, wondering: Would he fall for a hundred years, second by second, or longer–

He had only had a handful of the panting-silent-screaming-swirling-suffocating-stop-stop-stop attacks since near the beginning of his captivity on Asgard. Only a few in the time since Frigga had …

 _No_. He did not think about Frigga. Especially what Frigga had done, while he was in that cell–  
_I said no_.

_She will live again soon, when I have the full Gauntlet. I can think of her then._

I said. No. You sniveling. Idiot. Are you _trying_ to lose control?

You're supposed to be resting.

It was no good. It was coming. An attack was coming. He could–

_“Little prince. Take it. Wield it once again.”_

Loki did not raise his hand to the proffered staff. It glowed brilliant blue in the dungeon's unrelenting gloom. “I – I don't want it.”

_“You do.”_

“ _I don't_ – I don't – _I do not want what I want_.”

Another time, in a different dungeon. Frigga's eyes filing as he said the same words to her, just once: "I do not want it.”

_“You do.”_

_“I do not – want what I want.”_

Loki jolted back to the seat on Tony's plane. _Damn – damn damn damn._

He rubbed his forehead, sure there would be a burn mark there. There had been one there before, when the Mind Gem acted on its own – unanchored and on pure instinctive impulse – to pull him out of an attack.

There was a mark there again, curse it all. He felt it. He could only hope Thor wouldn't pay enough attention to notice.

Loki was sitting at the back of the jet. It had no companion chair, whereas the rest of the seats were in twos, and this is why Loki had chosen it. Thor, of course, had chosen the seat directly in front of Loki.

The blue eye appeared again.

Damn literally _everything_.

Thor's voice said, "I am sorry I told father about the message to Bredtre."

It took Loki a moment to orient himself. Apparently Thor had not figured out that Loki wished for peace and quiet, after all.

But what had he just said?

_Sorry?_

Loki laughed.

“From where does this come, Thor?”

“I … have been thinking.”

“I will, kindly, refrain from taking the obvious shot.”

“That is big of you.” Thor’s voice was warm.

A strange emotion flashed through Loki, and his immediate impulse to tell Thor to go back to his thinking and leave Loki be died on his tongue.

Thor had been “thinking.” Loki had ... no desire to ask him what he had been thinking about. Because it could be …

… but then, what if it wasn’t? It couldn't be. Thor did not have the humility, nor the imagination, to really apologize to Loki.

So he was left with the twin impulses to reassure Thor that he, Loki, was not worth feeling guilty over; and to stab Thor and watch him bleed for daring to think that Loki _owes him_ forgiveness.

Contrition. Contemptible emotion. To ask for forgiveness you could never deserve. If you've done a thing, you've done it. Such arrogance, and silliness–to ask for forgiveness.

Thor could never undo the things he’d done to Loki.

They were even.

"What do you want me to say, Thor?” he hedged after a moment. “What's done is done? Show me in danger? A battle lost is another won?”

Thor shifted, and Loki caught another flash of blue eye between the two leather seats before him.

"I do not expect you to forget it," Thor said quietly. “But I know you remember it with anger, and I hoped to … soothe some of that.”

The messenger incident. It had happened after Thor and Loki came of age, but quite some time before Thor's ruined coronation. It had ruined relations with Bredtre for centuries. Odin deserved it, after Nidavellir. It was Thor who told Odin that Loki caused it.

"And if I do 'remember it in anger,' what solution do you propose? Hm? Shall we tell father you lied? That it was you who changed the message? Or that the messenger did it, as a lark?"

The eye regarded Loki steadily. "I do not know that I can make amends for that at this late date," he said gravely. "Not directly. But I can try to make it up, indirectly."

Loki snorted. His chest was, by now, feeling perfectly alright, and he felt much less exhausted than he had a few minutes before. "In that case I'll start an orphanage on Vanaheim to make up for the Chitauri invasion, as indirect penance. Do you think the Nine Realms will embrace me then?"

"I." Thor blinked again. "Well I think there would be another orphanage on Vanaheim."

Loki stared at the window covering and briefly contemplated stopping Thor’s heart. He didn't want to, necessarily. But it's not as if it would be permanent. Nothing was permanent, now that Loki would soon have unlimited power. 

"Have you considered starting an orphanage on Vanaheim?" Thor asked after a pause.

"Don't you think I'd be a natural caretaker," Loki asked, grinning suddenly and with many teeth, and lunging toward where he could see Thor's eye.

Thor did not flinch.

Loki dropped the smile and looked away again. "Anyway Thor. I do not wish to reminisce with you."

"It was … meant as a peace offering," Thor said. "I want to tell you …"

"Tell me what?"

"... I. Was. Devastated by your death. Loki."

“Oh, spare me this, Thor, please,” Loki said before he could stop himself; the words were barely out of his mouth when he realized he rather wished he'd thought a bit before he spoke. He certainly did not want to discuss Thor's _sentiment_ , but perhaps he could have spoken more judiciously.

Thor was silent and Loki dared not look at him.

“Do you disbelieve me?” came Thor's voice after a moment.

“Of course I disbelieve you, Thor,” Loki said heavily. “Though I do not think you're lying.”

“You think I am mistaken.”

“Yes.”

“Loki, I–”

“Please do not make me shout at you, Thor.”

Thor went silent again. He shifted to sit right way forward in his seat.

Loki wasn't sure what to look at anymore, with Thor's eye gone.

“Very well,” Thor said with a sigh. "You should–you should try to sleep. You look like you have not done so since I saw you last."

 _All this caring,_ Loki thought. _Where was it when I was imprisoned?_ It wasn’t seven months ago that Thor, expressionless, looked Loki in the eye to say he’d given up on him, like a slash and burn farmer moving on from a ruined field. And now he was going on about Loki's death and worrying over whether Loki slept.

Loki leaned his head against the cool flimsy material of the airplane wall. Mind control was a powerful thing.

He wondered how Thor would be treating him right now, without it.

“Certainly,” Loki lied.

After a few minutes of silence, Loki realized that really was the end of the conversation. Thor had really let him end it.

Well. That was best. Anyway.

The jet's engine hummed.

He leaned his head against the wall again. He tried not to look directly at the fact that he no longer felt the need to hold the window shut.

The next thing he knew, the plane was jolting into its landing.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki arrives at Jane's house, and attempts to scry The Channeler once more.

By the time Loki found himself pacing the sandy asphalt outside Jane’s New Mexico dwelling, waiting for Thor to convince Jane and her friends to let Loki stay there, he was feeling both better and worse.

Better because his magic was trickling back. He still wouldn’t be able to do anything complex, but he could push and pull at reality in the little ways that were second-nature for him now that he had the Reality Gem. 

And worse because, now that he felt a bit better physically, he realized two things. 

First: He had apparently allowed himself to be invited by Thor to the home of several mortals who did not want him there. And he could not, on any level, blame these mortals for that. He imagined how Claire's aunts would react, if Loki showed up at their door asking for a place to sleep, and he … Wanted to stab the Loki he saw in that mental image. The _audacity_. But he forced the feeling down, reminding himself–he was doing this an awful lot now–that no little hurt he inflicted in pursuit of the Gauntlet would matter once he _had_ it. Nothing could be hurtful or unpleasant for anyone, then, if he didn't want it to be.

The second thing he realized was just how precarious his situation was. Yes, of course, everything was going according to plan. The Channeler would almost definitely head for Midgard once he heard about Loki’s stunt today, if he was truly – as Thanos believed – dedicated to the protection of Midgards throughout the multiverse. 

But if Loki could not scry him, then he could not subtly influence him to make _sure_ he checked his news sources. So Loki wouldn’t be sure The Channeler would even _know_ about it. And the last two times Loki had tried to scry him, it hadn’t worked. He’d gone somewhere Loki couldn’t see, or he’d occluded himself. 

Loki was beginning to wonder if he’d lost The Channeler in time and space. Which would be disastrous. 

Could Loki stand it, if he had to wait blindly for his lure to work on The Channeler, with only hope to ensure him that his plan would work? It felt something like walking a plank blindfolded, and without knowing the length of the plank. Too many times in Loki's life, Loki had been hurt because of missing information. A vague nausea registered at the thought.

And Shield would surely capture Loki soon. Once he was captured he wouldn’t have a chance to scry for hours, maybe days, depending upon when he regained enough magic to escape. 

He took a few deep breaths. _Focus,_ Loki. You’ll be able to scry him right now, tonight. You haven’t tried hard enough. You just have to get somewhere alone, to concentrate better–

What on _earth_ was taking Thor so long to convince Jane and her companions to let Loki stay here? Wasn’t Thor supposed to be a leader? And he could not lead this tiny band of mortals?

He paused in his pacing to listen to the voices inside the house and to watch the shapes moving on the other side of the windows.

The position of each scientist was fairly clear based solely upon the voices' tones. Selvig, practical and protective as Loki remembered him, was irate. Jane was concerned, but trying to be understanding. The other female who lived here was derisive.

They'd been in there for almost two hours.

Loki did not have time for this.

His magic was recovered enough for a few little pushes. And besides, little pushes when using the Mind Gem were much preferable to large rewrites. Large rewrites for Loki took time, concentration, and spell-weaving, and there was still a major chance of there being cracks in the facade, or of the change being suspected and destroyed by those who knew the victim. Large rewrites or bald commands with the Mind Gem are what got you caught. 

So, turning to face the house and fixing his concentration on the petite figure in the window, Loki pushed just a _little_ at the mind of Jane. Jane, who seemed to _want_ to give Thor what he wanted, but couldn't get over her concerns. She would _trust_ Loki. Trust him not to harm her, trust him not to be up to something; give him the trust she must see Thor gave Loki now.

And just to smooth his way, he pushed at the other woman’s mind in the same way; he had no idea if it would _work_ considering how disgusted she sounded, but when he pushed, the magic clicked into place. Clearly, she did not know enough about Loki to have an informed opinion.

Selvig, Loki left alone. After the Mind Gem spell from Thanos that Loki had placed on the older scientist, Selvig … was already unstable. Much too much trouble.

Loki clasped his hands behind his back and waited.

Jane was now speaking quietly and at length, as if she had come to a decision. The other woman – Darcy, he recalled finally – interjected occasionally in what sounded like annoyance. Selvig responded with resignation and horror.

The next thing Loki knew, Selvig banged the front door open and strode across the desert, past where Loki stood, toward a long Midgardian vehicle. He got into it and puttered away.

Jane and Thor were now standing in the doorway of the little house, looking at Loki.

“And here I thought he liked me,” Loki said, gesturing after the retreating vehicle. “He always seemed to before.”

Jane gave him a neutral glance, looking delicious as always. Loki briefly considered crafting some callous comment that would win him another of her delightful slaps, but judged that Thor would not take kindly to such obvious baiting. Loki did not necessary have time to brawl with Thor just then.

Another female, presumably Darcy, came up behind the couple and pushed her way between them, out of the house.

She was of average height, with a pleasant face, but dressed in the shabby manner that Midgardians preferred. Loki imagined, though, that she would be damned attractive in proper dress. She was well-shaped; he had little trouble imagining what the swell of her bosom beneath her thin cotton shirt would look like freed from that rag. They looked like they would make substantially more than a handful.

Between these two and Captain Rogers, no one could argue that Thor did not have attractive taste in Midgardian associates. Loki wished that he could have spared the magic to improve his appearance. He knew he must look tired, pale and weak in his simple clothing.

Annoyed, he gestured with one hand to pull his chair back into his storage dimension, and started forward into the house.

Darcy's mouth fell open, and none of the three figures in the doorway moved.

“Holy shit,” Darcy said after a moment. “Did you just disappear a piece of furniture? And why was there a piece of furniture on the lawn anyway? Can you disappear anything? People?”

Jane shoved Darcy discreetly, and Darcy reacted with an entirely indiscreet yelp. “What?” she asked.

“Don't be … you know, rude,” Jane said.

“How was that rude?”

“She can ask about my magic,” Loki said.

Darcy had magic of her own, Loki realized now that he was focused on her. It was trapped behind the ancient locks that rendered most magic on Midgard inaccessible, but its resonance was reasonably strong for a Midgardian individual.

“To answer your question,” he said, “yes. I can disappear people. Absolutely. Probably also small moons.” _At least_ , he thought, _now that I have the Gems_. Without the Gems, Loki’s powers were much more limited. But already over the last few days, he was getting used to having them. 

“Only small moons?” the girl asked. “Not regularly sized moons?”

“Not without advanced planning,” Loki replied.

“This is Darcy, by the way,” Thor interjected. “She is Jane's apprentice. And Darcy, this is Loki.”

“Darcy,” Loki said. “It is good to meet you.”

Thor beamed.

“You, too, God of Fucking Mischief,” Darcy returned.

Jane's smile was rather fixed, but she was doing an admirable job of holding it up.

“Loki, I wanted to let you know,” she said. “I'm not sorry I slapped you, the first time we met. You deserved it. But I won't do it again. You're welcome here, because Thor wants you here. And … thank you for saving my life.”

It took Loki a moment to realize what she was referring to, as he blinked at her mutely.

Then he remembered. Svartalfheim, the gravity grenade.

But he couldn't very well just say “You're welcome”; that would make it sound as if he'd done it for her thanks, or that he even wanted her thanks. And he couldn't tell her the truth, which is that he had not saved her for her own sake.

Why had he come here again?

“Well,” Loki said finally, “it's drilled into us on Asgard to protect those weaker than ourselves in battle. It was instinctive. Think nothing of it.”

Jane cocked her head to one side and looked at him oddly.

But Thor spoke before either could say anything more. “Why don’t we all go inside?” he asked. “It is cooler, and we can prepare you a room, brother.”

Loki was ushered into a front room filled with upholstered seating and small tables, and Jane and Thor commenced bustling up and down a set of stairs nearby, asking Loki questions as they passed–“Do you prefer a blanket or a comforter?” (Loki did not know.); “Do you want to sleep alone or, we could set you up a place to sleep in Darcy’s room, if you're more comfortable with someone around?” (I certainly need a private room.); “Are you thirsty?” (No.); “Do you need a change of clothes?” (Please do not trouble yourself.)–while Loki paced the room and Darcy leaned against a chair and asked him still more questions.

Though hers were a bit different than Jane’s or Thor’s.

“Do you always conjure furniture?” she asked as Jane walked past carrying a set of sheets.

“Always if I need it,” Loki replied, trying to remember not to ball his fists so tightly that his nails drew blood.

This hospitality, while certainly Jane's right to offer if it is what she wanted to do, was wasting even more time that Loki could be using to scry.

“Can you conjure money?”

“Money? You mean precious metals?”

“No, I mean money.”

Loki waved the question off. “I'm sure I could if I tried.”

“What about a nuclear bomb?”

That was a more interesting question. “If I studied one, it is likely.”

“But you'd have to study one first,” Darcy clarified.

“That is correct.”

“Could you conjure a _person_? Like a brand new person?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You can't _conjure_ sentience, that's like asking someone to bake you a wormhole. Grammatically sound, functionally nonsensical.”

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Loki stopped his pacing. “Uh, precisely,” he said.

Darcy gave a half smile. “That one’s not mine,” she admitted. “Why are you pacing?”

“Because otherwise I'll scream,” Loki answered. “Whose is it?”

“A famous linguist slash philosopher.”

“It is a good one.”

“I like it.”

“Loki?” came Jane’s voice from the stairway. She appeared a half second later and went to the kitchen, which was contiguous with the room where Loki and Darcy stood, and began to fill a tall glass with water. “Are you hungry?” she called over her shoulder.

“No,” Loki replied.

“Why will you scream?” Darcy asked.

Loki turned back to her. “Because I am … What was the expression? Keyed up,” he said.

“I saw you on TV, you know,” Darcy said suddenly. “Sort of. There was a shot of that giant screen with your face on it.”

“I'd imagine.”

“It's a good thing, what you did, you know that? You're trying to do good.”

Loki stopped again, and looked at Darcy. She really was quite young, maybe a … decade older than Claire. A decade, right? Those were the larger units Midgardians used to measure their lives? “Uh,” he said. “Sure.”

“I think after that you’re allowed to relax.”

“Ah,” Loki said, taking her meaning and beginning to pace again. “I'd rather not.”

“Are you always like this?”

“How?”

“'Keyed up'.”

“Generally.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“Not yet.”

“As in you haven't died of exhaustion yet.”

“Clearly.”

Thor brushed past Loki just then, carrying a large box of what looked like Midgardian clothing, and set it on the kitchen table. “Room’s almost clear,” he told Jane.

“You're dumb if you stay keyed up all the time,” Darcy said. “That's not what life's about.”

“I will take it under advisement,” Loki replied.

“Did you really kill another dark sorcerer?” Darcy asked.

“Of course,” Loki lied.

“How many people like that have you killed? People who wouldn’t be easy to kill.”

Loki’s breath caught.

She didn’t know what she was doing, asking him that kind of question. She didn’t know. How could she know?

Unless she was doing it on purpose. She could be needling him. _Stupid, stupid_ of Loki even for a moment to let his guard down, to allow himself to enjoy the rhythm of the conversation–

Stop it, Loki. There is no reason to believe that she is needling you.

Loki took a breath.

“Not many,” he confessed honestly. “Perhaps two dozen.”

Darcy laughed. “Uh, that's plenty,” she said. “Billy the Kid was famous for his body count and he killed like four people.”

Loki's flash of anger evaporated. Not that that was a pleasant sensation. The fear came back in its place, and he began to pace again.

“Were those lions real?” Darcy asked as he did. “And the mammoth? Since the bodies weren't, I was curious.”

“They were real.”

“And you turned the lions back to cubs? That was real?”

“That was real.”

“Loki,” Thor's voice and footsteps came from the stairs. “Your room is ready.”

The men looked at each other, and Loki had the odd sensation that he had been caught stealing a pie from the kitchens.

“Uh, Darcy and I were discussing magic,” he said.

Thor blinked. “Well,” he said. “Good.”

“Speaking of which,” Loki said, twisting a hand into one of his pocket dimensions to extract a small velvet bag, “I wanted to give these to Jane. For the hospitality.”

Jane, who was behind Thor on the stairs, reached out for the bag, face curious. Thor shifted on his feet uncomfortably, but allowed her to take it.

She dumped the contents of the bag onto her palm. A set of earrings made from the uniquely luminous aqua jewels of Altaheim glowed against her creamy skin. Loki had liberated the earrings from a royal treasure room, along with several other priceless but relatively useless items, for bartering purposes. You never knew when you might be able to obtain something with diamonds or gold when your magic had failed you. Or, as in this case, when you might need to give a gift to a Midgardian in order to avoid staying in her house on charity.

“Holy shit,” she breathed. “What … are they even … what creates the luminosity?”

Loki gave a half smile. “Ah, yes, you are a scientist,” he said. “I forgot. Perhaps you can run tests on them, then, if you do not wish to wear them. And if you'd rather something else–diamonds perhaps might be a more traditional form of payment–then I can–”

“No, thank you,” Jane said. “I can't wait to … Well, I'll wear them, too, probably.”

Thor was frowning at Loki slightly, Loki noticed.

Good. “Alright,” Loki said, nodding once. “Now where is this room?”

Thor shook himself and led the way up the stairs.

The room Jane and Thor had prepared for Loki was at the end of a narrow hallway. It was small, but they’d turned the bedclothes down for him. To think of Thor turning down bed clothes at all, let alone for him …

“Do you think you can sleep here?” Thor asked. He, Jane and Darcy were once again all crowded into a doorway looking at him.

Loki was hit again with the sensation that it was _wrong_ for him to be here. It hadn't been part of the plan, it wasn’t necessary to the plan, and though it would help speed along his plot with Shield, he _really_ should have refused.

“If I cannot, it is no fault of the room's,” Loki said.

“Alright,” Thor said. “If you need anything, Jane and I sleep in the bedroom at the bottom of the stairs.”

“And I'm right down the hall,” Darcy put in. “Door with the poster on it.”

“Poster?”

“Like a big shiny picture of a guy who looks like he's screaming.”

“... Naturally.”

“Don't make fun.”

“I'm not entirely sure that's what I was doing.”

“Come on, Darcy,” Jane interjected. “Let's leave Loki and Thor alone.”

Loki was going to open his mouth to suggest that maybe they should not do that at all, but they were gone. The fact that Darcy closed one eye at him as she went meant something on Midgard, he knew, but he couldn't remember what.

“I won't try to press you into conversation again,” Thor said.

Loki, surprised, realized only then that he was standing with his shoulders tight and his fists balled up once more, as if he was preparing for a fight. He opened his hands and flexed his fingers. “I–thank you, then, Thor.”

_Now go away._

“I mean it when I say you should come get me if you need anything,” Thor said. “Midgardian houses are strange.”

Loki nodded.

“Dream of peace,” Thor said.

Loki found his tongue did not automatically move to return the traditional evening nicety to Thor. He could not remember the last time he and Thor had been on good enough terms to say it to one another.

Wait–yes. Yes, he did remember. It had been perhaps twenty years after they came of age, when they were just starting out on the Tasks. Before Thor started getting all the better assignments, getting greater credit though Loki did well also, before Thor started asking Loki for help and never telling Odin about Loki's role in his success.

Loki swallowed his thoughts and gave Thor a false smile, to expedite Thor's leaving the room.

“Dream of peace,” he replied.

Thor shut the door, and Loki took in his surroundings, breathing shakily.

The room was small, but the bed was laden with pillows and blankets of several textures. The glass of water Jane had filled before stood on a bedside table.

There was a “quilt” on the foot of the bed.

Immediately, a sense of calm washed over Loki, without his consent: The quilt was yellow, blue and white. Just like the quilt from before, when he had gone to Midgard to escape from Thor and the Tasks and his own inadequacy, and he had been badly injured on the dark paths. He only barely made it to Midgard. But a merchant family found him and, being foolish, cared for him in their small but well-appointed home on the edge of a mid-sized town in the countryside.

He was younger then. He still held hope that life would give him a better future than present, a future that didn't require him to become _omnipotent_ to reverse the losses he had suffered. A future where he could still, with a small part of himself, believe that he might some day find friends, make up with Thor, gain the acceptance of … Odin.

He had been very young indeed.

He sat at the head of the bed, spine very straight, ready to cast. He pulled the quilt into his lap.

He reached out through his wormhole and grasped the Space Gem with his magic, pulling the Reality Gem and Frigga’s scrying glass from his pocket dimension with his other hand. Both gems could be used to enhance a scrying spell, and with Frigga’s glass to channel them, the spell to scry The Channeler _should_ work. With this much power behind it, it made no sense that it had stopped working. So Loki expected it to _start_ working any time now. It _had_ to. 

First, he opened – just to be sure he had a little time – a viewing portal to one of the Shield agents. This was a man that Agent Beck (who Loki had spent quite a lot of time with, on his visit to Midgard for The Other) had told him led many stealth operations.

Sure enough, the man was outside the little house, hidden in the bushes, apparently waiting for something. Probably, he was waiting for Thor and Loki to be asleep.

Positioning the portal so he could see it while sitting against the head of the bed, while someone barging through the doorway would see nothing, Loki turned away from the image.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, holding the the Reality Gem. If he just concentrated hard enough this time … it would work. The spell would work this time.

He focused on the idea of The Channeler–little as he knew of him–willing an image of the man and his current surroundings, whatever they might be, into Frigga’s glass. He touched the power of the Reality Gem with his mind, clutching it in his right hand so hard the pressure reopened the wounds in his palms and blood ran from the punctures to tickle him. He ignored it, focusing on The Channeler, willing all his thoughts toward him.

Nothing happened as blood began to drip onto the quilt and moisture began to leak from his tightly shut eyes. The slithering sensations of the bodily fluids broke Loki's concentration, and his eyes popped open.

Before he knew what he was doing, Loki hurled the gem across the room, and it lodged with a thump in the drywall. Loki stared at the embedded stone, panting, and realized he'd let out a cry, the sound still ringing in his ears.

He strained to hear whether anyone in the house would stir at the sound, using a tiny dash of magic to hear every sound inside the dwelling. Thor was speaking quietly, undisturbed, and Loki quickly allowed the sound to recede before he could hear much of what Thor said. Darcy was turning pages at a steady, undistracted rate. Jane was chewing something, but otherwise unmoving. All three breathed steadily.

Loki remembered then to try and breathe evenly himself – he was still panting, and he felt light-headed. He sat for a moment on the bed with a hand on his chest, remastering his strength. Then he crossed the room and retrieved the gem from the wall. With a flick of his wrist, he fixed the hole he'd made and pocketed the stone gem more.

He sat down at the head of the bed to watch the agent watching him, and dragged a hand across his stinging eyes. He wondered vaguely whether the dryness in his throat was thirst, but lost the thought before he could conclude it.

Shield would come for him soon. And there was nothing to do in the meantime about The Channeler but hope Loki’s lure worked. Once Loki escaped from Shield, he thought, there were a few more difficult-to-deploy options he could try for locating The Channeler once more. 

He rested his head against the headboard and willed his heart to slow, to avoid another attack. 

~*~

Thor shut Loki’s door behind him and made his way to the room he shared with Jane.

Bathed in lamplight, with Jane sitting on the bed and staring contemplatively at the faintly glowing star-and-moon shaped stickers on the ceiling, the room looked just as it always did this time of night.

But it was different. Jane, for one thing, was probably contemplating Loki rather than a remote star system; the nervous way she bit at the nails of one hand revealed that much.

And for another thing, the room seemed ... more open. Bigger. The window, which looked out at a clear and star-studded sky, connected the room to the universe, rather than betraying how separate the two were.

Thor went to the window and sat in a wicker chair beside it. The stars shined brightly in New Mexico.

“You look happy,” Jane said from the bed.

Thor glanced at her, and smiled a conciliatory smile. “I think I am,” he said. “I am sorry that the situation brings you only distress.”

Jane smiled back, without a hint of falsehood. “It doesn't bring me only distress,” she said. “Not if it makes you happy.” Her eyes darted, perhaps unconsciously, to the stack of leather-bound magic tomes beside the bed, which was just the way Thor had left it that morning. “And I know it does. Of course it does.”

Thor let his own eyes drift to the stack of books. The day's events had not diminished the impulse to finish reading “Portals, Gateways, and Other Magical Liminalities,” nor any of the other tomes that Thor had not yet cracked.

Thor felt a twinge of relief at that; now that Loki lived again, it was even more important that Thor try to understand his brother. It was clear that while Loki may be alive, he had by no means returned fully to his senses. Nor was he by any means at peace. Thor had most definitely noticed the blood on the hem of Loki's tunic, and the puncture wounds in his palms, as Loki and he waited for Tony Stark's jet airplane on the roof of a New York building.

For months, Thor had wanted nothing more than to understand his dead and apparently evil brother. Now, he wanted nothing more than to reconnect with him. Because Thor believed, though he wasn't sure why, that reconciling with Loki would help Thor to … move on. From the man he had been. From the man he, honestly, still was but did not want to be.

For some reason, a memory presented itself: Thor stalking down the Bifrost to travel back to Vanaheim during his campaign there to destroy the raiders, trying to convince himself that Odin was right to order Thor to meet the raiders in open battle in the little town where he knew they would be attacking, rather than hunting them down in the forest in the night, despite the high potentiality of women and children casualties. The campaign was as much about the spectacle of Asgard's might, Odin said, as it was about actually defeating the raiders; and so a spectacle they had to make. Thor had assuaged his uncertainty by promising himself that the battle would be glorious–and by glorious he meant, it would feel very, very good. It would feel good to hurt someone, to take out his uncertainty on the villains who dared to oppose Asgard's rule.

Thor winced at the recollection. This was the man Thor sought to leave behind: The man who, on another day, a day when he was feeling less bold, might've gone along with Odin's plan to let the Dark Elves simply march upon Asgard. And thanks to the role Thor had played in Loki's life, and the role he knew he ought to have played, reconciling with Loki felt necessary to that endeavor.

Not that it would be easy to reconcile with Loki. Thor could hardly bring himself to imagine bringing up the things he knew he needed to bring up between them. Whether he would have the courage to say the things that needed to be said, to ask the questions he needed to ask … He wasn’t sure.

But at least now, he had that chance. He could gather his courage later.

Thor smiled at Jane. “You are a saint,” he said.

Jane wrinkled her nose. “Try a word that doesn’t sound like my Catholic aunt is saying it,” she said.

“You're a … stuffed gecko?” he tried. She very much liked her stuffed gecko. Perhaps it was a compliment.

“That sounds like a food,” Jane said, half smiling.

“I suppose it does.”

Jane giggled, and grabbed hold of the gecko. Then she said, thoughtfully, cuddling the animal facsimile, “You know. Most of the time, when someone dies, they're really dead.”

Thor nodded. “I know,” he said. “I will not waste this chance.”

“It really is an amazing thing,” Jane said. She stared again up at the glowing stickers on the ceiling. “I hope he doesn't hurt you. And I hope the fact that he's alive, when he was dead and you had to process the fact that he was dead, doesn't … leave you too confused.”

“Me, too,” Thor said. “And I hope I don't hurt him.”

“You said he can be hard to deal with.”

“He always was,” Thor said, a smile somehow managing to tug at his lips even as some of his more negative childhood memories of Loki flashed across his mind. “He just … has his own agenda. That is no crime.”

“Except when it is,” Jane said. Thor glanced at her. She bit her lip but did not look away.

“Except when it is,” Thor conceded. “But I believe … hurting people was never an end for Loki. I cannot remember a single time when ever it was.”

“When do you think he'll tell you what happened to him? How he's alive?”

Thor looked back out the window. Ages, he thought. Maybe never.

“Loki is the kind who needs to do things in his own time,” Thor replied. “I think. I think he's the kind who needs space. So I will give it to him. It is … the least I can do, to try to accommodate him now.”

Jane nodded, her brow wrinkling. “I'm sorry I said that,” she said. “About it sometimes being a crime.”

Thor crossed the room and kissed her on the forehead. “You are still a stuffed gecko,” he said.

Jane's mouth opened, then closed, then curved into a smile. “Look,” she said. “If it's possible to bring him back to, what did you say? Sanity? Then you'll do it. If it's impossible in the first place, you'll fail, sure, but that's, well, that wouldn't be your fault, since that's the definition of the impossible, after all, and even you can't be expected to defy definitions, since they're, well, definitional–”

“You're–”

“Babbling,” Jane said. “Sorry.”

Thor flicked her gecko. “You know I like it,” he said.

Jane smiled again.

Thor realized quite suddenly that he now had, in the same house, both Jane and Loki. And he smiled back, feeling like a fortunate fool.

Then he stood up. “I think I'll go see if he's sleeping,” he said.

A moment later, he eased the door to Loki's room open, noting at once that the light was still on.

But Loki was there, on the bed, sitting up against the headboard, Jane's grandmother's quilt covering his lower body, breathing evenly in a light sleep.

His brow was wrinkled as if in concern during some dream, but he was otherwise quite peaceful.

The image filled Thor with a warmth that he would six months ago never have admitted to feeling, but which he was almost proud to say he could admit to now.

He flicked off the light, closed the door once more and made his way back down to bed. When he fell asleep, he fell into happy dreams.

~*~

Loki found himself waking before he was even aware he was in any danger of falling asleep.

The first thing he noticed was his viewing portal had blinked out.

The second thing he noticed was that this was just as well, because there was a mortal in the open window pointing a large, complex-looking gun at him.

And those were all the things he got to notice, because the mortal pulled the trigger, a foot-long plastic object zipped forward to lodge in Loki's thigh, and the world went black all over again.

That Shield had the technology to render him unconscious surprised him, during the second the tranquilizer took to work.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shield does not fuck around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, sorry to anyone who started this fic earlier this year. I am back now. Thank. 
> 
> Warning: This chapter is torture. I mean that literally. It gets a little graphic. Mind the whump and torture tags. 
> 
> Please feel free to comment either positively or negatively, but if you're negative be constructive, please. Thank you.

When he awoke once more, it took Loki about fifteen seconds to realize that he was in unexpectedly real trouble.

He was in a gray and white room, chained to a chair before a metal table. A mirror to his left probably allowed Shield agents to look in on him. A mesh circle and blinking red light high on one wall let Loki know they could probably hear him too.

That was all fine. He’d planned his capture and expected to end up in a room like this one. 

The problem was the cold weight in his chest, at the tender spot from which his power sprung. A matching cold weight on his wrists told Loki that Shield had successfully fitted him with Asgardian magic-suppression handcuffs. 

Just to be sure, Loki pressed his magic toward the chains binding his wrists, to make them disintegrate. The sensation of his own power eluding him felt like grabbing for and missing your tankard while drunk and seeing double.

Loki swallowed, his tongue sticking to the roof of his fuzzy mouth.

_ He had been sedated.  _ When he was supposed to be shorting out the magic-suppression handcuffs he assumed Thor had given Shield, he had instead been sedated. 

How Shield was capable of sedating an Asgardian-Jotun hybrid, he could not say offhand. 

This meant he was close to helpless. The Gems, without his magic as tack and harness, were far too dangerous to use. He might just destroy the building, but he would more likely destroy the countryside of – wherever he was – for miles around.

So unless he  _ wanted  _ to make a mess, he had only his tongue. He would have to convince them to take the magic suppressors off, somehow.

Powerless, Loki felt a bit less excitement over having already manipulated the minds of some of shields “interrogators” while scrying them. Thanks to that manipulation, they now wanted more than usual to cause pain and suffering.

_ How had they sedated him? _ How? And how had Loki been  _ stupid _ enough not to anticipate such a maneuver? Certainly, it made no sense whatsoever that they would have something that could sedate him. But he  _ should have had a back-up plan.  _

"What in the Nine did you shoot me with?" he said aloud to the room.

A moment passed before a sound like radio static came from the mesh circle; Loki swiveled his head to look at it, but paid for the motion when the room swooped. He closed his eyes.

“A special sedative,” a cool female voice said. “Developed over the last few months with your brother’s assistance.”

“My brother is not an alchemist,” Loki replied.

“No, but he’s an Asgardian,” the voice said. “He was our willing test subject, so that we would have a weapon against any of his compatriots who went rogue. Or more specifically – and he knew this – against you. We know, of course, that  _ you _ aren’t Asgardian, but we figured it was better than nothing. You both being long-lived, god-like beings and everything. Good enough for government work. But we weren’t sure what effect it would have. Could’ve killed you.”

“Yes, I am already so intimidated by the fearsome way you all hide behind sedatives and mirrors. You’ve done it. You’ve got me shivering. Congratulations.”

“How do you like the handcuffs?”

Loki smiled. “You said yourself I am not Asgardian,” he said cryptically.

The voice did not respond immediately. “But they work on you,” it said eventually.

“I’m sure they do.”

This time the voice was quiet for nearly a full minute before it answered, “We’ll be with you in a moment.”

Loki smiled again.  But he felt like a baby on a battlefield.

He resolved to make the Shield agents angry with him. He would set up two layers of lies. A simple play. A basic double-reversal of expectations. He had used it to escape from captivity no less than three times before. Of course … it had failed him on four other occasions, including on Nidavellir after he forged that disastrous trade contract with Alfheim.

But it would have to work this time. He could not break, and give up the truth. And he desperately did not want to resort to using a Gem. The idea of creating another disaster, another tableau of rubble and blood, had him swallowing bile at its sheer inelegance.

The door opened a moment later, and Agent Wallman – tall, pressed, and youthful – sauntered into the room, shutting the door behind her with a flourish.

They stared at one another.

“Have we got some great stuff planned for you,” Wallman said eventually.

“Will there be a parade?”

“You could call it that.”

“Splendid.”

Wallman smiled.

The interrogation began rather tamely.  A small man wheeled in a flat machine that bristled wires. This, Loki learned, was a “lie detector,” and it failed utterly to work on him–apparently, everything he said registered as a lie, whether it was "My name is Loki," "I have no plans on Midgard beyond breakfast with Thor this morning, perhaps you could let me go to get on with that," "I find the administrator of this test to be a bland and ridiculous little man," or "I am wearing a sparkling red ball gown."

So the man wheeled the machine back out, and Loki was left alone with Wallman once more.

“We’re going to try this the old fashioned way, then,” she said, leaning against the desk. “Why are you on Midgard?”

“For the cuisine,” Loki replied.

“What did you do to Thor?”

“When?”

“To make him believe you.”

“I told him the truth?”

“Loki,” Wallman said, clasping her hands before her as if she were about to explain something complicated. “We will kill you in twenty-four hours if you haven’t given us answers we can believe. Do you understand? We understand there’s nothing we can give you that you want. So we’ve got to set boundaries, and make up rules. All we can do is threaten you, and mean it. So I am.”

“You really think I’ll die, if you try to kill me?”

“I think your brother did us a huge favor when he told us all about the biology of you alien types,” Wallman answered. “We know you can’t use magic right now. We also know you  _ can  _ be killed by physical trauma, though it will take a lot.”

“And twenty-four hours from now, Shield’s interest in whatever I am supposed to have planned will expire? You’ll just off me without ever knowing what I might have unleashed?”

Wallman’s face remained impassive.

“I don’t believe it for a second, Agent,” Loki said. “Try again.”

“Who else have you mind controlled?”

“Clint Barton, Dan Beck, and Erik Selvig,” Loki replied.

“Recently.”

“That is recent when you live five thousand years.”

“Spare me. Why did you hand over the Infinity Gems?”

“So they would be safe.”

“Fuck you. Why?”

“You’re not even trying, Agent. It’s almost like you  _ want  _ me to remain uncooperative. Are you looking forward to the enhanced interrogation as much as I am?”

Wallman snorted. “You’re looking forward to it?”

“There is a special relationship between pain and magic.”

“Sure there is.”

“As you wish.”

Wallman stared. “You haven’t even got a lie you want to toss me, then? Other than the one you used in Times Square.”

“The  _ information _ I relayed in Times Square remains the truth, and no amount of inept questioning or joyfully imparted torture can alter that, Agent. Tell me, how long have you been out of the Academy? Six years? I have been navigating danger for nearly a thousand. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

“Tables turn,” Wallman answered simply.

Something roared inside Loki. But he kept his face impassive. “That they do,” he said.

“Nothing, then? There’s no story you want to try?”

“Does it bother your mother, what you do for a living?” Loki asked. “I can see she values femininity a bit more highly than you do. Or at least, a bit more highly than you allow yourself to admit you do.”

Wallman froze for only a second, then relaxed further against the table. “Does it bother yours, that you’re an insane tyrant and you’re not even that good at it? Oh wait, no. She’s dead.”

“I have sworn off hurting mortals, girl, but every rule has an exception.”

Wallman gave a half smile, and a stirring of real fear fluttered inside Loki. Already, she was getting the best of him. He was exhausted, powerless, his thoughts still in a tangle; he could admit as much. Her shirt was pressed and her breathing calm, her posture so relaxed she might have been waiting in line at the market.

Perhaps he should not mention mothers.

“What if I told you,” Wallman went on, “the first thing I have prepared for you is a classic, mythologically speaking?”

“Go on.”

“The culture that worshiped you and your family, for whatever reason, wrote that ‘Loki’ would end up locked into an eternal punishment until the end of the world. Do you want to know what it is?”

Loki had to restrain himself from snapping at her when he replied. “Why don’t you tell me.”

“Snake venom, dripping on his skin continually, melting it. There are a few other details that make it even worse, but they involve his wife and kids and as far as we know you don’t actually have a family.”

“And you intend to drip on me.”

“I do. But, for accuracy’s sake, it’s acid, not snake venom.”

“An important distinction.”

“Anything you want to tell me?”

“Your easy cruelty makes me wonder whether you’ll ever find love in your life,” Loki said thoughtfully. “Do you find you push people away without meaning to? That no one is ever quite good enough for you?”

“Do you find you favor your right or left side, for pictures? Because we’ll start the acid on the other side as a courtesy.”

“Do you find your friends abandon you after they’ve gotten to know you?”

A muscle in Wallman’s cheek jumped, but that was it.

And with that, the door opened again and the bland man wheeled in something new.

“So as you may know, Shield is in the weapons development business,” Wallman said. The bland man, who now wore a thick smock, removed the cap from a nozzle in the large porcelain basin that sat upon the wheeling table. He picked up a long tube, and attached it to the nozzle.

“But we develop other stuff, too,” Wallman went on. “We have an annual budget of just over $20 million just for the research and development of new enhanced interrogation techniques. Isn’t that fun?”

It occurred to Loki that Shield’s creativity exceeded his expectations. Perhaps his pushes, with the Mind Gem, hadn’t even been necessary after all.

And at that moment, Shield had in its hidden North American headquarters no fewer than a dozen other prisoners who were up for enhanced interrogation. The plan was for Thor and any other Avengers outraged by Shield’s treatment of Loki to discover this, and become further outraged. This would  _ ensure  _ that The Channeler would want the Gems removed from Shield’s control -- and so make it all but inevitable that the Channeler would end up lured into Loki’s trap. Not to mention that it would teach Thor a lesson about who he had been choosing to keep company with. But now, Loki wondered distantly whether things might get out of hand for those prisoners. He didn’t like the idea that he might have miscalculated. 

Not that it mattered, he told himself. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, now, except lacing on the fully equipped Infinity Gauntlet. But he still felt ill thinking about it, and wished he didn’t.

The bland man assembled a metal tree and snaked a tube along it, until a nozzle hovered above Loki’s head. Wallman picked up a square plastic switch connected to the basin by a black wire.

“This is the button, here,” Wallman said, holding it out toward Loki. “Each time I press it a little spurt of the acid will fall onto your skin wherever I point this nozzle. And here’s the best part.” She waved to the bland man.

A moment later, from behind Loki, the man placed a black cloth on Loki’s eyes and adjusted a strap behind his head so that it fit snugly.

There was a moment of silence.

Loki wanted to shake his head violently, to throw off the blindfold. He wanted, frankly, to scream and strain against his chains.

Pain he had anticipated. Immobility, blindness–these things he had not anticipated.

“Here’s what it’ll feel like, by the way”–

Loki didn’t hear the rest of what Wallman said.

A tiny fire lit on his temple, burning and crackling. Loki could  _ hear  _ his flesh blister with a chemical sizzle.

He jerked his head away from the sensation, but did not cry out.

“Ah, I can see you didn’t like that,” Wallman said.

Loki took a steadying breath. The fire was sliding down his face, making for his jaw line.

“I was … surprised.”

“That’s the idea.”

“You do know that last year your agency was responsible for the deaths of nearly three thousand women and children as a result of a botched operation in Uganda, do you not?” Loki said. “If you are not aware, is it that you don’t care who you work for? If you are aware, I suppose you do not mind that sort of thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And yet what I say is true. Ask Dan Beck.”

“Maybe I will. But I’m otherwise engaged right now.”

Unruffled. That was the word for her. Loki wasn’t sure he  _ could _ enrage her.

“Why can’t you mortals prevent yourselves from committing atrocities?” he asked. “You make so many  _ noises  _ against them–”

Another small fire lit upon Loki, this one behind his ear, sliding down his neck. His words cut off with a gasp.

“What in the Nine,” he heard himself breath; he gritted his teeth to prevent further betrayals of his tongue.

Loki felt a little dizzy, like the interrogation room was pitching on a rough sea. The fire had turned cold on his cheek and jaw.

“I’m starting to see the muscle on your face,” Wallman said. “It’s really pretty reassuring, to see that this acid works on you the same way it would on any meat creature.”

“Do you really think I am powerless?” Loki ground out. “That is a ridiculous, small-minded,  _ mortal _ notion, girl. I cannot be contained by bits of engraved metal. But they do change my power. I have less control of it with these cuffs on. Do you want to know what happens, when I unleash my power though I lack control of it?”

“Hmmm. Bad things?” Wallman answered.

“Certainly,” Loki said. “Though I don’t know exactly what. I do not want to find out. And trust me, neither do you. I have quite a lot of power.”

This, of everything Loki had said, seemed to give Wallman the most pause. “Okay,” she said. “That sounded true. But if it is, why not just unleash it already? This can’t be pleasant.”

“I am … endeavoring … not to create anymore messiness.”

“How’s that going? I mean what with the mind control you’ve placed on Thor and, from what I can tell, the President of the United States. Or is that not messy?”

“I have never met the president of the United States.”

“Hey,” Wallman said, snapping her fingers. “Why not unleash your power now, Loki? I know you’re distracted, but stay on track here.”

The fire on Loki’s cheek intensified, grew, and he let out a grunt. His breath, he realized, was coming a bit too quickly.

“I already answered you,” he said.

“I don’t believe your answer.”

“I can’t help that, can I, you half-bred, inbred, Tennessee, trailer-park bitch!”

Wallman did not reply right away.

And then a torrent of fire, unlike anything Loki had ever felt, began to spread on one thigh.

Loki cried out again, and jerked against his bonds.

He needed to stop it. What could he do? The heat, the pressure, the smell of his own flesh corroding -- what could he do? 

_ Nothing. It’s fine.  _

“How do you know those things?” Wallman’s voice cut through the roar of pain in Loki’s ears. “I get you’re supposed to be this super observant spymaster type, but Tennessee? You did not just infer that I am from Tennessee. I have  _ no accent _ .”

“Beck,” Loki said. His voice broke; he felt himself scowl in disgust at the sound. His voice came out deliberate and steady when he finished, “Our mutual acquaintance.”

“Ah,” Wallman said. “Well. So. You’re trying to make me angry. Why?”

This was good, Loki through distantly. That was the first step of his ploy: Get them to ask why.

He didn’t know if he would be able to hold on for long enough to finish this, though. The power of the Gems tugged at a corner of his distracted consciousness, and if Loki found himself suddenly unleashing their power without even consciously making a decision to do so, it would not be the first time he betrayed himself.

Loki had to beat himself to the punch. If he could get her to take the cuffs off before he broke down and used the Gem, then everything would be fine. He would portal back to Jane’s house–or somewhere–and everything would be fine.

“I’m … not,” he said in a tone he hoped would sound like a lie.

“You are.”

Fire. Heat. On his fingertips this time, each one, in turn, as if Wallman were carefully placing drops on each. Loki jerked his hands away, but they didn’t have far to go.

“Alright, alright,” he said. “I might be. Trying to make you angry.”

“Why.”

“… Because you’re cute when you’re angry?”

“Have you noticed that you’re shaking?”

Loki had not. But she was correct. “So?”

“You seem to be going into shock. I may have miscalculated the amount of acid I poured onto your leg. There’s a pretty big hole in it.”

Loki did not want to see that.

“Can shock kill a … what are you again? A Jotun?” She pronounced it with a hard J.

Loki did not correct her. “It can,” he said instead.

“Right, then,” Wallman replied. “I suppose it’s on to phase two. Unless you want to tell me something I can use.”

“What … is phase two?”

“Worse.”

Loki tried to still his shaking, and it did absolutely no good. It didn’t even hurt  _ that  _ badly. His body was being dramatic. 

“I’ll be back, but I’m going to let you spend a little while with an interested party,” Wallman said. Small sounds to Loki’s right indicated that the bland man was packing up the acid distribution system. A moment later, the blindfold was removed. 

The man wheeled the acid apparatus from the room. Wallman followed him out with a wink.

“Wait!”

Wallman turned at Loki’s outburst.

“Please,” Loki said, his voice trembling. “Just lock me up. Lock me up for good.  _ Stop this _ and just … lock me up someplace. In the deepest, darkest cell you have. Please.”

Wallman turned back to him interestedly. “Lock you up,” she said.

“Please.”

“Why?”

“Just … I’m no threat in a cell, am I?”

“I guess not,” Wallman answered. “Unless you are. What are you planning?”

Loki shook his head. “Nothing. I just … want it to stop.”

“I’m not sure that’s 100 percent believable. You’re a smoother operator than that.”

“I’m really not.”

“Come one. Give me something.”

“… Perhaps I was not working alone.”

“Go on.”

“Perhaps … the other dark sorcerer I mentioned, I did not kill him. Perhaps he’s coming for the Gems.”

“And?”

“And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. My part is done. It’s finished. I’ll tell you everything there is to know about Thanos, but you won’t be able to prevent him from getting them from Midgard, now. There is nowhere you can hide them from him. My job was merely to bring them here.”

A slow grin spread over Wallman’s features. “Oooh, I see,” she said. “There’s nothing  _ we _ can do about it. But maybe  _ you _ could do something. Is that right?”

Inside, Loki felt his hope disappear so fast it might have been conjured away.

On the outside, he shook his head weakly. “I don’t know if there’s anything I could do, either,” he said.

“Stop the ploy, Asgadian,” Wallman said flatly. “I’m on to you.”

“I don’t know what you–”

The door to the room shut, and Loki was alone.

_ Damn the witch, and her pissing mother, may her line be beset by ticks and plague, Norns and Fates, just  _ damn her to Hel.

Loki let out a sob that began in his chest, and let his chin fall to rest on his breastbone. He barely even felt the sting of it as a few drops of acid fell from his jaw line and onto his tunic, eating through the fabric and into the flesh near his nipple.

He kept his eyes firmly shut. He didn’t want to see his thigh. He could smell it, though. A smell like cooking fire and astringent. Loki tried to breathe through his mouth. 

_ Brought to this by a mortal.  _ And this wasn’t even a  _ necessary  _ part of his plan. 

A familiar worry wormed its way to the front of Loki’s mind:  _ Why did I do this? Why did I take this kind of a risk -- over nothing? What was so important?  _ He scrabbled against that part of the worry for a moment:  _ What was so important? What?  _

And the answer swooped in, just as familiar: Shut up. It had to be done. Get on with it. 

His mind shut. 

So … how to get on with it? Wallman saw through him. He had to come up with some new tack to take, some new ploy. Something brilliant, improvised, never before seen.

He waited. 

… Brilliance did not manifest.

_ Damn you, Loki.  _

Then the door opened again, and the spiky gray hair and square jaw of a Shield agent Loki knew well passed into the room.

“Agent Beck,” Loki said heavily. The agent shut the door behind him. “It was my understanding you had retired early, citing ‘mental trauma sustained in the line of duty.' Don’t tell me you’ve come back to work just for me.”

Beck’s jaw set and he planted his feet to stare at Loki. “I’ve come back to work just for you,” he said.

“Well I am flattered, but not surprised,” Loki replied, keeping his voice admirably steady. “I believe the mortals call it Stockholm Syndrome. Asgard calls it fealty.”

It was then that Loki realized the agent held a needle.

The agent began to tap the capped instrument in one palm. "I remember liking your wit," Beck said, his voice raw as if from screaming. "Thinking you were charming."

"That wasn't part of the spell," Loki said. "That was your good judgment."

A small, faraway part of Loki winced. He was no longer sure just why he was being so venomous. There was no longer a tactical purpose to it.

"We really have you now, you know," Beck said. "You're here, tied up, and there's nothing you can do about what they've got planned for you."

"Is it anywhere nearly as good as the things I made you do to that young woman?" Loki said ruthlessly. "The one with the–what did you say?–'bejeweled' purse. You said it reminded you of a sister. How is–"

"She's fine," Beck cut in. Loki found his tongue stuck in his mouth, rather than running on. "They both are."

Something desperate in the tone of Beck’s voice made Loki really look at the man for the first time since he had come into the room.

Loki had a bit of trouble focusing his gaze–his head was pounding–but when he did, he saw that Beck looked even more tired than he had when Loki released him from mind control. And though Loki was no expert on the rates at which Midgardians were meant to age, he rather suspected that Beck’s lined face was older than his years.

Well. Either suspected it, or just imagined it in order to make himself feel worse.

Loki closed his eyes again. He allowed himself, just for a moment, to wallow in something, though he wasn’t sure quite what it was. 

Maybe it was alright if Beck hurt him.

"Do you want to know what this is?" Beck asked after a few moments. From the corner of his vision Loki saw the former agent hold up the syringe.

Loki swallowed. "I suppose," Loki said. "I'd imagine it's something quite cruel. I did teach you rather well."

This came out sounding much more frightened than goading, all in all.

Beck smiled sadly. "I'm not going to tell you," he said. "I'm going to show you."

With that he crossed the room and plunged the now uncapped needle into the soft flesh just above Loki's breast bone.

Loki recoiled in surprise as Beck pressed down the plunger. The agent’s expression put Loki in mind of Heimdall’s, his eyes hunting from star to star to find some answer asked of him.

Beck drew the needle out. Loki expected unconsciousness. 

That is not what he received. The sensation began as a cold tingle across his chest; soon in crept over his shoulders and up his neck. His muscles, in the wake of this sensation, began to feel oddly slack. After just a moment, he found himself sliding sideways as if he had relaxed the muscles that held him sitting upright.

He moved to right himself, puzzled, and found that the effort did no good. The command upon his own body went unheeded.

Loki tried to look up at Beck. The attempt failed. Beck shuffled sideways, putting himself again in Loki's line of sight.

"It's a paralytic," Beck said, peering at him. Loki found that he could just barely move his toes. The motion reassured him, so he did it again. The second time, it didn’t work.

He tried to move a finger – just one finger.

No.

A whimpering sound came from somewhere nearby. When Loki realized it was he who made the sound, he shut his mouth tight; well, then. He could move his jaw, anyway.

The pain on his thigh, cheek, neck and fingers was in no way lessened by the paralysis.

Beck seemed to consider for a moment, then shook his head; the image swam in Loki’s vision.

"Damn it," Beck said softly.

"What?" Loki asked. The word came out a bit slurred, but understandable.

Beck shrugged. “I thought this might do me some good,” he said.

Loki understood the sentiment, but the din of panic and pain swirling between his ears made it hard to remember it.

“Perhaps if it’s useless you could reverse the effect,” Loki said, careful to speak each word clearly, hearing his own words as if through a thunderstorm. “I can’t imagine what kind of coward needs his target paralyzed before asking him a few simple questions.”

Beck pressed his mouth into a line and raised his eyebrows. “Right,” he said. “Anyway. I’m going to leave you like this now. And uh, later, when they put you in the tank, I want you to know that sometimes, I’ll be watching you.”

He turned and left, the broad door clinking shut behind him.

Loki could not see the door, and could not turn his head to look at it.

"The tank"?

Loki suddenly realized that he had  _ no idea  _ what was behind him in the little room. He had never turned to look. How had he missed such a thing? How had he not foreseen that something like this might happen?  _ And now he could not check _ . He strained his eyes to the edges of his peripheral vision, trying to expand his field of view. It did no good.

Loki waited. And wondered how long he would remain immobile. And strained to move a finger, trying each in turn.

After a certain period of time it became apparent that either something had gone wrong – a meteor had crashed into the Shield base, for example, killing everyone and burying Loki alive and paralyzed to die slowly and alone – or the Shield interrogators were leaving him to enjoy paralysis.

After a longer period of time, Loki no longer saw either possibility clearly. Panic, it turns out, when given no outlet in physical expression, grows like a nest of maggots.

What if a mortal paralytic had a permanent effect on him? What if they left him here for days, like this, until his muscles deteriorated from complete disuse–he tried even just to tense them, not move anything, just clench up the muscles in his calf or abdomen or upper arms, to no avail. What if they started in on him like the Fae, but now he could not do anything to lessen the effect, could not flinch, could not even use body language when he spoke. He held neither power nor leverage of any kind, like this.

But then, things got substantially worse.

Another agent, not Wallman nor the bland machine operator, came into the room after an indeterminate length of time and hoisted Loki onto a stretcher like those Loki had seen at mortal hospitals. Loki’s arm was pinned beneath him on the rolling bed, and he could do nothing about it. His full length was exposed to attack upon the stretcher, and he could do nothing about that, either. The impulse to curl up, to protect his body from the burly agent, did him no good at all.

The man blindfolded him again.

Loki realized after a few moments that his heart was hammering, his breath coming in short gasps. He endeavored to slow it, and discovered that his will was insignificant in the face of the panic coursing through him: He could not stop the breaths from coming shallow and fast. He already felt light headed. He–

Liquid.

He was submerged. Red and black flashes burst through his brain as he did the one and only thing he could: Hold his breath. His mind screamed with the need to fight against it as his body settled just below the waterline of its own accord.

Then arms around his shoulders pulled him up, and he gulped at the air, though still only shallowly.

“Stop!” he said, anticipating the next dunk. “Stop it! Please. I can’t.”

He was aware that he was begging. He accepted it. This could not continue. This feeling of utter helplessness, Loki could not tolerate. Not again.

Another pair of hands brushed against Loki's chest, and sturdy straps snaked around his shoulders and torso. Fingers fastened a clanking buckle, and both sets of hands withdrew. Loki was left suspended half in and half out of the water, held aloft by a kind of harness. The water stung his thigh.

"We can't stop, I'm afraid," came Wallman’s voice. "Your brother told us simple pain wouldn't work on a trained Asgardian. So we thought we'd try this."

A hand caught his wrist and, a moment later, a small sharpness pricked there, followed by the sensation of a coarse cloth being secured around the little puncture. A tingling began to spread from the needle now embedded in his skin.

"This will keep you immobile for as long as we need," the specialist said.

Loki's neck was bent in a way that would soon become quite painful. His limbs where they were suspended in the room temperature water seemed to exist in a world without stimuli or control. They might as well not exist at all.

The absence of sensory input, the utter lack of control, it – well, the last time Loki felt this way, he soon after found himself captive of the Fae and their experiments upon his Aesir-Jotun biology, then rescued by Thanos, rescued to be tied to a chair and  _ talked to _ , for days, until he didn't remember why he  _ didn’t want what he wanted _ , lost his intentions, lost any connection to the man he'd hoped someday to be, and then, before he knew it, he was standing on a tower and looking out at a battlefield of a war that was not his own. 

Why didn't they just  _ hurt  _ him again? The pain, he could handle. He wanted it, actually. Suddenly he saw clearly that from Midgard, Claire's people, he deserved nothing but punishment. But this was not punishment. This was ... an invitation to lose his mind. Which seemed counterproductive to the notion of punishment. If he broke, and he may well, how could he even know if he was being punished?

Of course, more practically, if he broke, the universe would end in seventeen days.

Loki almost laughed, then. He had been so concerned with whether they would inflict  _ enough _ damage on him before he escaped to elicit sympathy and outrage from Thor. Now he might not escape at all, and in the meantime he was being made to lose his grip on reality. All because, like a child or a fool, he had failed to see the whole chess board. He was not worthy to play.

“Please,” he said again. “Stop this. What do you want.”

As if in answer, the feeling of suspension began to creep up his chest. He did his best to take a deep breath, managed only a slightly less shallow one, and stopped breathing. Water closed around his ears.

Loki wondered, briefly, if he were perhaps still falling, had always been falling, and everything that had happened since he fell was really only the fevered dream of his fractured mind.

He wasn't breathing, but his chest still hitched painfully.

Eventually, it also began to burn. He would have to breathe soon. He would have to. He was going to–

The subtle tug on the straps was the only suggestion that perhaps he was out of the water again, and he could not prevent himself from chancing breath. Fortunately, air rather than water rushed into his lungs.

He was shaking all over despite his lack of muscle control. Wonderful, that his body retained the ability to betray his cowardice even when it retained no other purpose.

"Per ... perhaps you could repeat ... the questions?" he said through streams of water snaking down his face. Droplets slid down his spine, their touch light and mocking.

"What are you here on Midgard to do?" Wallman asked again.

Loki pursed his lips and considered, as best he could through the fog of panic.

He had three options, at this exact moment. Tell the same lie he had been telling. Tell a different lie. Or tell the truth.

A different lie, then. That might stop the suspension. That might get him back, if not in control of his limbs, at least  _ in contact with something  _ again.

But what lie would get him into the least trouble? He could think of nothing. His original plan had gone nowhere.

At this rate they would keep him here until Thanos arrived to take the Gems and make off with Loki to punish him even more creatively than Shield was doing. But he couldn't tell them the  _ truth _ . He could not endanger his chances of obtaining the fully equipped Gauntlet.

Nothing. Loki could think of nothing to say. He needed a moment to collect himself, to think, to breathe, but–

The suspension slid up his body again, and took a deep breath that came out as a sob.

Once again plunged into the quiet nothingness, holding his breath, Loki felt a heat welling up in his chest against his will.  _ The Power Gem,  _ he realized. Its connection to him meant that, like the Mind Gem did when it pulled him out of an attack, he couldn’t always quite control it. 

The heat grew. Loki fought it – 

But it did no good. A wave of energy erupted from him like a backdraft. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor and Tony Stark look for Loki at the Shield base.

Black cars and olive Jeeps crept like spiders up and down the streets of the Shield base. On a nearby hilltop, Tony peered at them through the magnification feature of his mask.

"What do you see?" Thor's voice came from Tony's right.

"Magnification off," Tony told Jarvis. The image receded and Tony turned to Thor. 

"Nothing," Tony said. "It looks like business as usual."

"But you can get me to my brother," Thor stated.

"Yep," Tony replied. A blueprint of the New Mexico base was among the files Tony stole from Shield while visiting the helicarrier during Loki's attempted invasion. "I can take you straight to him."

"What did you say they had him in?"

"Something called 'the suspension chamber.' Didn't sound great."

Tony did not add any more detail than that, even though he had listened to plenty of details over the last few hours via the listening device he'd planted on Loki. The device had shorted out a little while before, leaving Tony to use his imagination about what else Shield would do to the alien.

Thor nodded, staring at the ground. The guy looked wrecked. Tony felt a little pang of guilt at not letting Thor know earlier where his brother was.

Loki hadn't said a damned thing during the interrogation that either he or Shield could use, and Tony had begun to wonder–just a little bit, just to make sure he'd considered every possibility–whether Loki wasn't telling the truth. Hadn't Tony decided he would try to be a team player? And wasn't Thor on his team?

But, it was fine. Tony had let Thor know in the end, and here he was. 

Was Tony going soft? Maybe. What the hell did Tony owe  _ Loki of Asgard _ ? Not a damned thing in frozen hell.

But Thor, Tony had to admit he respected. And a deal had been made with Loki. And ... Well. If Shield got some bad press for this, wasn't that quite the bonus? People didn't like torture. They especially didn't like torture from organizations they already distrusted.

Thor looked up from his apparent reverie, and looked at Tony.

"Let's go," he said.

"Wait," Tony said. "One more thing. Come here."

"What?" Thor growled. But he turned around.

And Tony was there to knock him hard across the temple.

Thor, surprised, stumbled sideways before recovering his footing and lunging for Tony.

Tony put his hands up innocently. "No, no, I don't want to fight you!" he said. "Cranial recalibration!"

Thor stopped. He lowered Mjolnir, and his expression went from furious to resigned. "Fine," he said, relaxing his posture. "I still want to retrieve Loki. Are you satisfied?"

"For now."

"Then let us be off."

~*~

Thor landed just a few feet from the two Shield agents, causing a flurry of white chalky earth to swirl around the three of them.

Tony landed a few seconds later and a bit farther away, in the straight street that ran through the center of the base.

Thor advanced upon the two agents, hefting Mjolnir with false casualness.

“Where is my brother?” he asked. “You will bring him to me.”

Tony's metallic footfalls let Thor know the Iron Man had drawn up just behind his shoulder.

“Just hand him over, and this doesn't have to become an interplanetary incident,” Tony said. “I’m here as peacekeeper. You should listen to me.”

The two agents, one of whom seemed to be an officer because he wore no helmet, held their guns steady and trained on Thor.

“I don't know what you're talking about, I'm afraid,” the baby-faced officer said. “If you hand over your weapons and come with me to our HQ, we can give Director Fury a call and straighten out this misunderstanding.”

Thor's knuckles went white as he gripped the handle of his hammer more tightly, and he briefly considered both consenting to a reasonable conversation and smashing the guard into the cement, but Tony spoke before Thor could make a decision.

“Alright, Agent Smith, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “Give this a listen, then let's talk.”

The sound of Tony pressing a few buttons on a panel of his suit came from behind Thor as he eyed the confused Shield agents. A recorded voice began from a speaker embedded somewhere in the Iron Man armor.

“Report,” came Fury's voice.

“Lie detection failed to function in conjunction with Aesir-Jotun biology,” a cool female voice replied. “Request permission to move him to the suspension chamber.”

“Did we try traditional enhanced interrogation?” Fury asked.

“Love that part,” Tony interjected.

“Yes,” the woman answered. “I think we got as far as we'll get with that. You'll recall what Thor and Agent Beck advised”–

“What is that supposed to be?” the officer cut in. His hands on his compact automatic weapon shook. “And how do you have it?”

“Doesn't matter,” Tony said, shutting the control panel in his suit. “Just matters I do. Let us in or this guy here, this demi-god friend of mine, he's probably going to get mad.”

“I am already mad,” Thor put in. “I am controlling myself. But controlling my own impulses toward violence has never been my strong suit. I believe I may be losing the struggle.”

“Look, I don't know what's going on here. Let me call my supervisor, and we'll–”

“You two!” came a clipped voice from up the road the four men stood near.

Thor looked over. A contingent of jeeps was speeding toward them, around black cars and between the base's neat, low buildings. A man stood up in the passenger seat of the lead vehicle, staring them down over the jeep's roll bar. Several helmeted agents pointed automatic weapons.

Thor unconsciously lifted Mjolnir into overhanded strike position.

“Or not,” the baby-faced officer replied. “Guess they don't want you guys here.”

Thor glanced back at the officer. The young man looked hesitant.

Then he lowered his gun, and pushed the other agent's gun down too. “Come inside,” he said.

A half a moment later, all four were in a wide, tiled hallway beside what looked like a security booth, and the officer was tapping at a small keypad.

Sturdy metal doors slid from inside the wall and shut over the more traditional glass door through which they had all just come.

“Let's go, Iron Man, Thor,” the officer said. “We should have some time now. Rebecca, man the desk.”

Dazedly, the masked agent nodded.

“Good choice, kid,” Tony said. “What's your name?”

“Jensen,” the man said. “Richard.”

“Well, Stark Industries will probably find you a job, when you lose this one. We give fewer orders there, so there's less chance of you ignoring them.”

“Come on, Man of Iron,” Thor said, eyeing the three-way split at the end of the hallway. “Which way?”

Tony glanced to the left, seeing something only he could see, then pointed. 

The group made its way down a series of hallways, Tony navigating as they went.

Richard Jensen trailed Thor and Tony, waving off the concerns of the various agents that attempt to block their paths–“Just let us pass,” “No time to explain, Avengers Initiative business,” “Stand down, man, if you value your job!”

The fact that mortal media meant both Thor and Tony were highly recognizable probably helped.

As they moved through the hallways, Thor felt himself relax, now that he had a purpose: Retrieve Loki, by force if necessary. He shuddered, remembering the twelve hours of damned  _ uncertainty  _ he had just endured. First, uncertainty over where Loki was: Had he been kidnapped? Had he left to enact some further scheme? Was it alright for Thor to suspect as much? Then, after Tony revealed Loki's location, uncertainty over what Shield was doing: Did they have a good reason for taking Loki, that Thor did not know about? Did they have information he did not? Was he misunderstanding the situation?

It was a tremendous relief to give in to believing that Shield was in the wrong–both because it felt so much more natural than had the uncertainty, and because it meant Thor might soon see Loki.

He did not think he could take Loki dying again. Thor was already confused and fractured enough.

And  _ damn Loki anyway _ , for  _ always, always  _ being the most  _ confusing  _ thing in Thor's life. Damn him for  _ always  _ making  _ everything  _ so  _ complicated. _

As Thor, Tony and Jensen passed through a series of rooms with glass walls, a high-pitched alarm began to sound, interrupting Thor's thoughts.

“What is that, Tony?”

“I'd say that's our sign to walk faster.”

“Intruder in Building D,” came a female voice from above. “Evacuate non-combatant personnel. Intruder in Building D. Evacuate non-combatant personnel.”

“Oh man, what if this is like a war crime?” Jensen asked.

“Shield is the war crime,” Tony replied as the three approached a heavy door. “And, I'll pay for your lawyer.” Jensen keyed something in at a pad near the door, and the keypad beeped.

“It's not working,” Jensen said. “They've locked down the sys–”

The floor suddenly shook with enough force to make Thor nearly lose his footing, and the fluorescent lights overhead flickered. A rumble from deep inside the complex reverberated when the shaking stopped.

“Uh, is that normal?” Tony asked.

“... No,” Jensen answered.

“Is there any Shield-related reason at all the building would be doing that? Because I don't exactly want to be trapped inside if there's going to be an earthquake.”

“No,” Jensen repeated.

“Thor?” Tony tried. “Any ideas?”

“One,” Thor said, his jaw tight. “Loki.”

“Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. If that happens again, I might just be out of here.”

Thor just shook his head and stepped toward the unopened metal door.

“Back up,” he said loudly enough to be heard across the barrier. “Anyone on the other side of the door, stand aside. Now.” He paused. Then he struck.

The door bent sideways easily, folding over beneath the weight of Mjolnir.

“Jensen?” Tony said. 

“Yes?” 

“Call me at Stark Tower tomorrow. I’ll leave your name with the front desk. Now, get out of here before Loki blows the building up.”

Jensen nodded and started back the way they'd come as Thor and Tony crossed through the broken door into a sparsely furnished lobby or waiting area.

“Stop right there!”

Thor gritted his teeth and turned to the source of this command.

Three agents stood in one corner, two with guns trained on him, one desperately switching aim back and forth between Tony and Thor.

“We're almost there, Point Break,” Tony said. “Just keep walking. What can they do to us?”

Thor stepped forward again, eying the agents.

A cracking sound was followed by a small pain in his upper chest. The bullet put a dent in his armor and pinged to the floor.

Thor turned and launched himself toward the agents, Mjolnir raised.

Then he stopped, lowered the hammer, grabbed hold of each gun in turn, and bent it into an L-shape.

“Or do that,” Tony said behind Thor.

Just then, the building shook again. The lights wavered and went off, leaving the room illuminated only by the slivers of light that came in through doors at either end.

“Intruder in Building D. Evacuate non–” The voice cut off. The distant alarm continued to sound.

“You guys should get going,” Tony said. “This place might not be safe in another minute.”

The agents backed away, only turning their backs on Thor and Tony when they were well down the hallway from which the two men had come.

The door in the lobby led to a new kind of hallway. Rather than tile, the floor was concrete. Rather than bright florescent lighting, a smattering of bare bulbs left the corners in shadow.

“Three doors this way … and … here,” Tony said.

They stopped before the broad door and, just for a moment, listened to the alarm. The building shook more violently this time, and Thor had to brace himself on the wall until the shaking subsided. A bare bulb fell to the ground with a crunch.

“We should go in,” Tony observed.

“Don't. Let me. Kill anyone,” Thor bit out. “Anyone.”

Tony blinked. “I'll do my best,” he said.

Thor opened the door.

What he saw was not what he expected to see.

Loki was held up in a kind of harness, half in and half of a pool of water embedded in the ground, his body slumped–slumped as if dead, but–but glowing with a bright red light.

Thor did not like that light. Something about it … something–it was dangerous.

And hot. The room sweltered, and Loki seemed to be the heat source. Various equipment had fallen over to break or scatter across the tile floor. Half the fluorescent lights were out, and the other half were blinking. Here and there, the flimsy ceiling material littered the ground.

A well-dressed woman and a burly man stood behind Loki, in a corner, huddling together as if in fear.

The notion that, once again, Loki had engineered his captured to unleash some force upon Shield popped out of a corner of Thor's mind like a Jack-n-the-box.

He shut the box firmly, and endeavored to control the tone of his voice.

“Loki,” he said, even as he saw his brother tense, and another tremor overtook the room. He raised the volume of his voice, but kept his tone even. “What is going on here?”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor finds Loki in the facility. From there, things go either very well or very badly, depending on your perspective.

"Loki, what is going on here?"

A new voice.

Thor's voice.

Thor's voice, not accusatory.

Outraged, alarmed. Not accusatory.

_Why not accusatory?_

Loki was about to bring the building down.

So why not accusatory?

Loki's panic ebbed by a few inches before he knew quite why. He felt the power of the Gem fall away from him. The relative chill of the water and air around him hit his skin once more.

"You, get away from him," Thor's voice came, closer now, behind Loki. 

Loki tried to take a deep and steadying breath, and found that he was in fact able to do so.

"Holy fuck," came another familiar voice. The Iron Man. "What in god's name are you even doing to him? Is this legal? What did you do to his leg?"

A clicking sound. The Midgardian device ... Camera. A very, very distant part of Loki’s mind was glad of that.

"Take him down. Now," Thor said.

Loki realized that a loud and grating noise was sounding rhythmically from far away.

"What are you all doing here?" Wallman asked.

"We're rescuing this prisoner from what is obviously torture," the Iron Man replied. More clicking. "I suggest you hand him over."

"You have no right to be here," Wallman replied. But she sounded uncertain. Afraid.

A warmth pressed toward Loki, the water moved around him as if disturbed, and hands gripped the buckle at his chest. Unfastened it. "Loki, are you in there?" Thor asked quietly.

"Get out of there!" a deep male voice cut in. Probably the burly agent.

"Paralyzed," Loki said.

One arm wrapped around his waist as another slipped his arms through the straps.

Gently.

This was all wrong. Thor was meant to be angry. Smashing Shield.

"How in the Nine did they do that to you?" Thor asked.

Well, he _sounded_ angry.

"Injection," Loki replied.

Thor lifted him onto a hard floor. Loki could feel his head lolling on his neck like a rag doll’s. One of Loki's feet flopped into the water. Thor lifted it from the pool and put it on the ground.

“What were those tremors?”

“Power,” Loki replied, his tongue thick. “Mine. Out of control. Better now. Are you angry with me? You didn't sound angry with me.”

Thor made a sound like a growl, and Loki felt fingers near the wound on his leg. He hissed. 

Thor sighed. “I am angry,” he said. “But not at you.”

"We need to get out of here," the Iron Man said.

Fingers at Loki's temples. The blind fold gone.

Bright. Loki shut his eyes.

"How do I give him back the use of his limbs?" Thor said above Loki.

Silence.

"Tell me!"

"Fine," Wallman said. "Here."

Loki felt Thor stand. "You do it," Thor said. "And if it does _anything_ other than what you say it will, I will kill you personally, right here in this room."

A pinprick on his upper arm. Loki forced his eyes open.

White walls. Fluorescent light. Wallman kneeling beside him. 

A flood of warmth through him. Arm. Chest. Neck. Abdomen. Hand.

He tried to wiggle a finger. It took concentration, but it worked.

Thor a few inches from his face now.

"Is it working?" Thor asked.

Loki tried to nod. He succeeded.

Thor smiled warmly. "Good," he said. Then his face went steely, and he looked up at Wallman again.

“How did you make these wounds?” he asked.

“Acid,” Wallman replied.

Thor gave her a hard look, and then looked back down at Loki.

"Let's try to stand you up,” he said.

"Cuffs," Loki said instead. "Off."

Thor glanced down and seemed to realize that Loki's arms were pinned behind him.

"The cuffs?" Thor relayed to Wallman.

“I don't know if that's such a good–”

“Now.”

“I really think he might be a–”

“ _Now_.”

With a shake of her head Wallman knelt again, extracting a key from one pocket. She rolled Loki over–he allowed this–and the cuffs fell from his wrists.

The magic flooded back, filling a hole in his chest that had ached while empty. Loki let out a sigh of relief. He was breathing normally, now, though still shaking.

He moved his arms beneath him, and pushed upward, trying to stand. Seeing what he meant to do, Thor braced him.

His limbs felt weak and trembled, like he had run for hours. The acid burns pulsed with pain. But after a moment, he was upright. Though he wasn't sure how long he could stay that way.

He swallowed the impulse to throw off Thor's arms. It was more important that they get away than that Loki make a point.

He could, later, endeavor never to see Thor again after allowing him to see Loki in such a weakened state.

Yes. That was a great idea.

The Iron Man appeared on the other side of Loki. Took his other arm.

"Let's get out of here," Thor said. He looked at the Iron Man. "What is the fastest way?"

"If you will allow it," Loki said, but then he closed his mouth as a sudden wave of a nausea crept up his throat. He closed his eyes and swallowed. Thor's arm around his waist tightened, drawing Loki closer in. Loki ignored the mix of rage and relief this set off inside him.

"If you will allow it, I believe I know the fastest way,” he finished.

"Yeah?" the Iron Man said. "Had a lot of time for exploring while you were here?"

"Just hold on to my arm," he said.

He opened his eyes, reached out for the Space Gem, and stepped forward.

The motion pulled all Loki's remaining strength from him like a magnet. But the white room disappeared, the cool air was sucked away, and Jane's house came into view, the sun beating down on the three of them.

"What. The. Fuck?" the Iron Man said.

Loki's legs gave out. His knees buckled. Thor caught him. Loki shoved him away, but Thor held on and went down with him, setting Loki gently on the asphalt. 

Loki slumped immediately sideways to lay on the ground, not entirely on purpose.

"Oh, Norns, Thor," he said after panting for a moment. "What _would_ you do for excitement if it weren't for me."

Thor shifted where he was knelt near Loki. "I suppose I'd need a hobby," he replied.

"Knitting?"

"Maybe horse breeding."

"Is he okay?" the Iron Man asked, standing hesitantly a few feet away.

Then the door to the little house opened, and unleashed Darcy.

Jane looked out from behind her as the younger woman burst from the door and crossed to where Loki laid and Thor knelt.

Loki suddenly felt very peered at, something like a garden peacock admired by too many bored ladies in waiting. He remembered, once, that a garden peacock had attacked Fulla without provocation. Loki now understood the provocation.

"Whoa, hey, what's wrong with him?" Darcy called. "Was he with Shield after all? Should I call 911? Is he hurt or is he drunk? He looks like he might be drunk–Oh fuck! What happened to his leg?”

The two women drew up to the group. Jane looked down at her phone.

“I'm calling 911,” she said, voice trembling. “What did they do to him?” She put the phone to her ear. “Is that a chemical burn?”

This was all much too much for Loki to be taking in, just at present. He just needed a flesh and muscle potion from Eir and … wait. No. He wasn't on Asgard. He wasn't thinking clearly.

“Don't call 911,” he said anyway. “I don't … I am not going to a mortal hospital.”

“He does not need 911,” Thor agreed. “It looks much worse than it is, for us. I have seen him heal well from greater wounds. I have a potion that will help him greatly, if you will go to retrieve it, Jane. In my goatskin bag.” He described the potion's appearance.

Oh, thank the Fates. Loki's hand flopped onto Thor's leg in thanks. By the time he realized this had happened, it was already done. He jerked his hand away.

Jane's eyes darted between the brothers. “Are you sure, Thor?” she asked. “That looks _really bad._ ”

“As I said, for an Aesir–or for Loki–these injuries are painful but not life-threatening,” Thor said.

Jane sighed and glanced again at Loki's leg, but then she hung up the phone and went back into the house.

Loki realized that the very slight sadness that had begun to a niggle at a corner of his mind sprung from the ease with which Thor had agreed Loki was probably fine.

_It's not as if you deserve his pity._

_I do not even want it_ , another voice said, more viciously.

Thor was looking down at him now, Loki noted. Loki relaxed his expression to ensure it betrayed nothing; the action reminded him of the pain on his cheek, and he winced.

“What else did they do to you, Loki?” Thor asked quietly.

"Nothing," Loki said. "You know all of it. Acid. Paralysis. Dunking. It may have affected me ... Disproportionately. It was …"

Loki trailed off. Thor stared at him.

"What?" Thor prompted.

Loki tipped his head back and forth on the asphalt in the prone facsimile of a head shake.

Darcy sat on the ground crossed-legged beside Loki and looked him over. "You do look like hell though," she said.

"I am ... shaken," Loki said. "That is all."

"No, I can see the muscles of your face and leg, Loki," Darcy said. One of Loki's hands was suddenly enfolded in a slim feminine one. “If I hadn't done an internship at a hospital in high school I might be gagging. But what do you mean 'paralysis' and 'dunking'?”

The nausea returned in force, and Loki closed his eyes again. "I would rather not," he said.

“What does he mean?” Darcy said. Loki assumed the question was this time addressed to Thor.

"I'm gonna go, then, yes?" the Iron Man's voice came again, preventing Thor from answering. “You all seem to have this handled, and I've got lots of things to build, things to do, people to see, people to do–”

"Yes, please!" Loki answered him. "And if everyone else wants to follow your esteemed example, that would be spectacular."

"Yeah, great, right," the Iron man replied. "You guys have a great ... Whatever this is. Get … better, Loki, I guess. Thor, let me know if I can … pay for anything, or anything, to help."

"Thank you, Man of Iron," Thor said. "I may owe you my brother's life."

"Yep, you do," the mortal replied. "And, you and I have got some fascinating info on Shield which I think we should make sure isn't wasted."

"Mmmm," Thor rumbled. "I most certainly agree."

"Great," the Iron Man replied. "I'll be in touch."

With that, he ignited the small flames that powered his suit. Loki opened his eyes and turned to Thor when the sound of the thrusters faded. "Now my turn for questions," he said. "How did you find me?"

"Is this the place for these conversations?" Darcy asked.

A surge of rage at being– _simultaneously_ –vulnerable, weak, and now also _questioned_ by a _mortal_ nearly blinded Loki.

"Do you have no sense of place, harpy?" he said, turning to Darcy and jerking his hand from hers.

Darcy's mouth fell open, as did Thor's.

There was a moment of silence. "No," Darcy said finally, though the pause had already betrayed her. "I don't. Thanks for asking."

"Perhaps you should cultivate one."

" _Perhaps_ you're being an asshole," Darcy said.

Loki regretted what he had just said.There were serious drawbacks to always being hyper-aware of other people’s insecurities; snapping at them in anger tended to do more damage than it would otherwise. But he couldn’t exactly change course at this point. “You have no part in any of this,” Loki said stiffly. “You are here only because you have inserted yourself into Jane’s life–”

"You do know that you might be a prince on Asgard, but here you're just some guy, right? How’s that for _place_?" Darcy cut in. 

Loki abruptly ran out of steam. He wanted to disappear, to be alone. He wanted that potion, and then he wanted to disappear. This had been an awful, terrible, near-disaster of a day.

What he wanted was to curl up in a dark cave where no one could _peer at him_ , but having no cave, a dark bedroom would do.

"I ... know," Loki said. He threw an arm over his face.

Another silence followed this remark. Then the sound of the front door opening told Loki that Jane had returned, and he forced his eyes open.

Jane glanced over the group of three people sitting or lying on the asphalt, shook her head, and sat beside Thor.

“This one?” she asked, holding out a glass bottle with a gilded cap.

“Yes,” Loki answered for Thor, grabbing at the bottle. But another wave of dizziness put him right back flat on the ground with another muttered curse.

It took a few minutes, and Loki liked none of it, but Thor managed to help Loki drink the bottle of lyfja. It tasted, as always, the way soil smelled.

A sense of free-floating guilt seized Loki, as it generally did when he drank this potion. Through his life, drinking the lyfja meant he had failed in some way. Sustained an injury when Thor and the others were counting on him. Fallen behind when the others were pushing ahead.

This time was no different.

"We should probably get you inside, Loki," Jane said when the bottle was empty.

"I can get myself inside," Loki said shortly, settling back on the asphalt as Thor recapped the glass bottle. "It just may take a few ... hours."

That might have been an exaggeration (and Loki wasn't sure why he had made it). Loki could already feel the burns on his face and fingers easing a bit. It would still take time to heal–Eir's lyfja was suffused with her powerful magic, but it still took time and rest to work properly. Loki also suspected, though he had not yet had occasion to test the theory, that he could do a bit of healing using the Reality Gem, should he need to.

"Ohhh kay," Darcy said, shifting toward Loki. "The lady didn't ask, she suggested cordially, which is what Jane does, but that doesn't mean it's any less of an order, soldier.” She positioned herself behind him and grabbed his shoulders from underneath. “Thor, you want to help me with this?”

Thor's hands snaked around Darcy's, strong and sure in contrast to Loki's weakness.

“No, thank you,” Loki said, jerking away from both their touches. He sat up straight. The asphalt lot, gas station, and little house spun, and Loki thought he really might be sick this time. “Really, I'm fine. And what did I just say about places, Darcy?”

“You're gonna piss me off if you keep saying that, Loki," Darcy said. "No one's gonna believe any of it, so just let us be nice to you. Okay?"

Loki blinked at her.

Darcy leaned forward again. Loki recoiled. Darcy moved closer still. Loki stared her down, then moved backward.

“Darcy–” Jane called, just as Thor also called,

“Loki.”

Loki and Darcy ignored them both.

They performed this maneuver a few more times, Darcy crawling toward Loki on the asphalt as he scooted backward.

Finally Darcy advanced once more and Loki, feeling somehow satisfied, remained where he was.

Darcy put her arm around his shoulders, and rose. It was a bit of a struggle, but soon they were standing.

"I'm–thank you," Loki heard himself mumble.

"I bet," Darcy answered.

Loki waved off the impulse to wonder at his own behavior, at that precise moment. Thor walked alongside them, his eyes cast down, as Darcy guided Loki toward the door.

Loki considered what had just happened to him.

He had just been tortured and then rescued by his brother. And now was being helped to walk by a young mortal woman whom he had just insulted.

The main problem, among all these circumstances, was the part where Loki was rescued by his brother. That had never, ever been part of the plan.

The desert around him spun again, and he reconsidered. Perhaps his actual injuries were the worst part. Or …

The tank. His own idiocy had landed him there, in the tank. His own arrogance and lack of foresight–again. Again, he had gotten himself into a position like that. _Why_ did he _keep_ thinking himself qualified to go after what he wanted, to gain _anything_ –he was _not worthy_ of improved circumstances, naturally, _not worthy_ of victory, he would _always_ fail, it was his destiny, his nature–had the frost giants not lived _most of their history_ destitute and miserable because of a losing war against Asgard? Perhaps they were not monsters, after all, but they were _failures_ –

Loki, how are these thoughts so different from your old ones? Frigga's voice asked in Loki's head.

They're ... I am in control of whether I hurt others–I am not in control of–

Stop.

_I can't._

Damn you, Frigga. You _died_ before you could make me _really believe_ –

Stop this.

"Loki?"

Jane peered into his face with concern. Loki stared at her. His expression, he was sure, did not betray his thoughts.

"You look zoned out," Jane said. Loki realized then that they were all standing just inside the house, Darcy still supporting him. "Are you okay?"

"After what he just experienced, I am not surprised if he zones out," Thor said.

"'Zoned out'?" Loki asked.

"It's when your mind glides off into a large empty space, and pirouettes there, absently," Darcy said.

Loki couldn't help but smile as the group crossed the room with the many upholstered seats. He apparently was being taken to sit on one of them. That was fine, for now. He could rest there a minute. "That is quite a striking image," he told Darcy. "Apt."

"Also not mine," Darcy sighed.

"Another famous linguist and philosopher?" Loki asked, his tone interested. A peace offering. Though why he felt compelled to make peace with these people he could not say; if he really wanted peace, he could always just manipulate them further with the Mind Gem when his strength returned. He did not have to _chat_.

"You could call her that," Darcy said. "Or you could call her a suicide, a novelist, a poet."

"Darcy likes to name drop," Jane said.

"False," Darcy said. "I quote drop, and wait for people to guess. Because it makes me feel smart."

"Sylvia Plath," Jane said.

"You only know that because I've used that one around you before," Darcy said.

"Guess you'll need a bigger arsenal," Jane said.

"Fuck off," Darcy said happily.

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one," Jane replied.

"Einstein."

"She does listen!" Jane said.

"Not to the math," Darcy muttered to Loki.

“I must read something from this Einstein,” Loki muttered, allowing himself to be guided. “He sounds like he understood much.”

Darcy deposited Loki onto the long padded seat that stood in the center of the small front room.

He sunk into it, his limp body melding with the soft cushions.

But then a jolt of panic stiffened his spine again.

He could not see behind him. The back of the seat was undefended.

Loki glanced around the room for a more suitable resting place, and spied another long padded seat, this one with its back against one wall.

"Do you think," he said to Darcy's freshly raised eyebrows, "you could help me over there instead?"

"Why?" Darcy asked. But simultaneously, she leaned down and put her arm around him again. It occurred to Loki that this was a mixed message.

"Ah," he said. "Because …"

Darcy helped him to sit on the couch, and plopped herself down on the low wooden table that stood before it. Loki remained seated upright rather than lying down again, afraid to betray just how weak he still felt. Thor'sstuck in a closet near the front door. 

"Yes?" Darcy prompted.

"It looks safer?" Loki tried, shocking himself with his own honesty.

Darcy looked back and forth between the two couches. "You're a little bit nuts, huh?" she said after a moment.

"Darcy!" Jane called from the kitchen. "Don't insult our guests."

"Kay mom," Darcy said.

Loki leaned his head back and closed his eyes. When no rage welled up in him at Darcy's words, he lifted his head again, puzzled.

"Well," he said. "No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness."

"You've read earth philosophers?"

"Only up through what you call the Dark Ages."

"No one realm can produce enough difficult prose for Loki's appetites," Thor put in, still rummaging through the closet.

"Just like all nine can't produce enough innocent shepherdesses for yours," Loki replied. Then he cracked an eye in Jane's direction. "Or is that part of his life meant to be over?"

Thor glanced around at Loki, his face red.

"I," Jane turned from the kitchen cabinet she was rummaging through. "Didn't know that was a thing he did."

Darcy snorted. "He may have settled down, but his tastes haven't changed," she said.

"Are you calling me innocent?" Jane asked. She pulled something from the cabinet, picked up a basket from the counter, and came back into the front room.

"And a shepherdess, I believe," Loki put in.

"Who are the sheep?" Jane asked.

"Mostly Darcy," Thor returned, coming from the closet with a stack of pillows and a blanket. He set them on the couch beside Loki.

"I didn't move to a different _planet_ for her, but I know someone who did," Darcy said reasonably.

Loki noted that the pillows beside him looked quite soft. He laid down on them, and closed his eyes. A silence followed, and Loki considered briefly the possibility that all this joviality was being put on for his benefit.

The mind control was certainly working. Loki wondered if he shouldn't feel a bit less annoyed at the transgressions of those around him, considering they could not be a danger to him; they were under his thumb. At this rate, Thor would break from Shield without even seeing the rest of what Loki had set up for him to discover about the organization.

Loki wondered whether – if he just made sure Thor, Jane and Darcy never found out he had mind controlled them – Loki could forget he had even done it, and they could all go on like this as if it hadn't happened. Maybe he could stay here, for a while, even after he had what he wanted.

 _Fates, Loki, of course not_. What a _stupid_ , _childish_ , _sentimental_ thought.

Loki searched himself for the strength to stand up, and go to the upstairs bedroom where he could be alone.

But there were small hands on his thigh, and a touch of cool metal.

Loki's eyes popped open. Jane was knelt beside him, scissors in hand, cutting at the cloth of his pants around the wound in his thigh.

Which he had not looked at, until that moment.

A mottled mass of jagged red flesh dipped toward glistening muscle tissue mingled with something white and slick. The hole was probably a few inches deep, and ran from mid-thigh to knee.

His nose filled with the scent of cooking fire and astringent.

Loki barely had time to roll himself over so that his vomit sprayed onto the carpet rather than the upholstered furniture.

He slumped over the edge and stayed that way, staring dazedly at the mess he had just made and wishing he had the magic to freeze everyone else in the room so they would not see him like this.

A broad hand on his back told him that Thor had risen and come to his side.

“Don't touch me!”

“I–”

“Get off. Now.”

Thor's hand retreated. The small coldness of the metal sheers returned to his thigh.

“Loki, I'm going to remove the cloth from around the wound, then you're going to go into the shower and run your burns under the water for twenty minutes each, okay?” Jane said quietly. “I just looked it up on my phone, and that's the treatment for acid burns. I know you're not human, and you'll probably be fine, but it would make me and Darcy feel better.”

Loki looked up at Jane. He could not imagine making the trip all the way to the bathroom. “Alright,” he said anyway.

The next several hours were hazy with exhaustion and pain, for Loki. Darcy made him drink water, and he nearly pushed her across the room with a magical force, but resisted the impulse. Then he made it, with assistance, into the bathroom, where his wounds were flushed, dried and dressed.

By the time he made it back to the couch along the wall, he was unable even to focus on his desire to be alone.

Someone had cleaned up the mess he'd made. One blanket was now tucked into the couch like a sheet, and another lay atop it.

Loki collapsed and laid down immediately.

“Thor,” he said, his eyes threatening to close.

“Yes?”

“May I have the quilt from the bedroom you lent me? The blue and white and … yellow one.”

“Of course,” Thor said. And he disappeared up the stairs.

Loki's eyes did close.

A strange female voice filled the room. Loki's eyes flew right back open and he bolted up straight, blinking.

The “television” was on, a woman speaking on the screen. Darcy squatted in front of it, her fingers inches from its control panel, staring at Loki. A pitcher full of water and a glass stood on the table near Loki. The quilt was spread over him.

Apparently, he had fallen asleep for a few moments.

"Sorry, kid," Darcy said. "It's a TV, it–"

"I know what it is!"

Darcy looked at him sadly. "Okay," she said.

Loki took a breath. "I was merely surprised," he said.

"I get it."

Loki felt quite small, and that sparked a surge of loathing–which he decided to direct at Darcy. He laid down again, but commenced glaring at her. The loathing made him feel awake again.

 _Darcy Lewis_. She had no sense of proper behavior, nor of the power Loki wielded, the things he could do.

… What forms might her magic take, were he to unlock it for her? Would she learn quickly, as Loki had?

"... a delegation of representatives from each member of the United Nations, along with several other international groups, to discuss what should be done about the 'Infinity Gems' handed over to U.N. organization Shield on Tuesday afternoon by the alien Loki," the woman on the TV said.

Loki's gaze darted from Darcy to the television.

This was good. The news was spreading. The Channeler would surely–probably–most likely–find out the Gems were all easily accessible, right here on Midgard, protected only by a mortal organization.

Loki had occluded them entirely from those who would locate them technologically or magically, with the only exception to this occlusion being The Channeler.

"The Prime Minister of Britain has gone on record already saying, quote, 'Shield is meant to protect the member nations, not to horde intergalactic weapons.' That echoes the sentiments first voiced by Tony Stark in the wake of the handover on Wednesday."

The image switched to one of the Iron Man.

"Shield is a great organization," he said. "But they can't be trusted as the sole and single caretaker of a power this great. No one organization can. Power corrupts. I should know, right? We will see that happening to Shield, if it hasn't already. And when it does, tell 'em who told you."

The woman's image returned.

"When reporters with CNN asked Thor, brother of the alien Loki, for information on the weapons, he responded with a hand wave." The image of the woman cut away to show her from a different angle. "And in local news tonight, a young man drives the wrong way down a highway, causing a crash that kills one man and three dogs."

Loki lay back down. Everything was working out beautifully. Everything, except for his damned inability to scry The Channeler, so that Loki could be sure his plan would take.

That and … why was Thor still here? He was meant to be gone, avenging Loki, smashing Shield. He sat on the couch next to Jane, Darcy on the floor in front of them, both women on their cell phones. Thor looked like his thoughts were far away.

“What are you contemplating, Thor?” Loki asked innocently. Quietly.

Thor looked at Loki. “I thought you slept,” he said.

“Not yet.”

“You should.”

“I will try.”

Thor nodded. That had not gone exactly as Loki planned.

“I am sorry, Thor,” Loki tried again. “About … what you had to see today.”

“I do not blame you,” Thor said, frowning.

“Well,” Loki said. “I am still sorry that everything … came to that.”

“Such contrition is not your wont,” Thor said.

Damn it.

“I only mean that I know you are allied with that organization. It cannot be well, to know your friends do such things.”

“No,” Thor agreed, staring at the TV. It was saying something about a cat fashion show. “It is not.”

Darcy stared intently at her cell phone, but her eyes and thumbs weren’t moving.

Loki let Thor sit with that thought for a moment.

And it paid off.

“Tomorrow, I believe I will speak with the Iron Man,” Thor said. “I believe there are many conversations to have with Shield.”

“As you will,” Loki said gravely, nodding. He would have been grinning, now, had the situation not required otherwise.

Darcy – Loki could swear – smirked.

Loki was fairly certain he did not allow himself to fall asleep again as the evening wore on, with the three inhabitants of the house all watching news reports and apparently not knowing what to say to either Loki or one another. Loki's eyes drifted shut a few times, but if he slept it couldn't have been for more than few minutes at a time, because he did not dream.

Then, Jane and Darcy each in turn excused themselves to go to bed, told Loki to sleep well, and departed. Darcy turned the television and front room lights off when she went up the stairs.

Leaving Loki and Thor alone in the darkened room.

At some point, someone had placed another stack of blankets and pillows on the unprotected seat – called, it turned out, a couch – and with these Thor made himself a bed as Loki looked on, vaguely horrified.

He would not be getting any time alone, tonight.

After a few minutes of Thor staring at the ceiling and Loki watching him do this, Loki figured he might as well fill the silence.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

“The Iron Man,” Thor replied, apparently unsurprised that Loki was awake. “Tony.”

“Explain.”

“He placed a tracking device on Nick Fury that also transmits the sounds of whatever is happening around the Director, like a kind of primitive _kve-gjallar_ ,” Thor said. “He heard someone reporting to Fury about your torture.”

“That is quite clever of him,” Loki said quietly. “When did he do that?”

“I do not know.”

_Oh, Norns._

What if he put one on the Gauntlet, too? Would Loki's technology occlusions placed upon Shield's databases apply? Probably not. It wasn't scrying, exactly. Wherever the Gauntlet was, Tony might know it. 

But, what could Tony do to endanger Loki's plans, even if he did know?

… Plenty of things. Tony must be dealt with tomorrow, Loki decided.

“Why did he do that?” Loki asked.

“He does not believe that Shield is trustworthy,” Thor said simply.

Well. Loki knew Tony felt that way, already. He had counted on it, in fact.

“Did he … say anything else, about what he heard from the device?”

“No,” Thor said, shifting in his makeshift bed. “Why?”

“Because I … am a bit worried, now, myself. About what Shield will do with the Gems. After what they did to me. They are only mortal. They cannot do much harm. Can they?”

Thor considered, then said, “I do not think so. I will ask Jane, in the morning. She will know better the state of Midgardian science and what it is capable of. I cannot think why I did not ask her earlier, actually.”

 _I can_ , Loki thought. You “trust me.” Three cheers for the power of mind control.

“Thank you, Thor,” Loki said aloud.

“... Loki?”

“Yes?”

“Are you telling me everything? About the Gems? About why Shield captured you?”

His voice was … plaintive. Like a child.

“I.” Loki's voice stuck in his throat. “Yes, Thor,” he said. “Of course.”

 _He will believe you, he will believe you_ , Loki told himself. _He is spelled to believe just about anything you say._

“Alright,” Thor said at length. “I … Do you feel safe, staying here? I would imagine they might come back for you.”

“I will set magical wards upon the house in the morning, if that's alright,” Loki answered. “I would do it now, but … the day has drained me. I do not have the magic.”

“I assumed as much,” Thor answered.

Loki nodded, though Thor couldn't see it. Loki did not bother to say anything.

“... Try to sleep,” Thor said after a moment.

Loki sighed in answer, and turned toward the back of the upholstered seat upon which he lay.

“D–dream of peace,” Thor tried.

Loki found the words came easier, this time. “Dream of peace,” he answered.

Silence descended.

Loki's leg throbbed. His bandaged fingers ached. His face stung.

He did want to sleep. But, of course, he could not. Not until he put up the magical wards. But he did need to rest, to stay still, to let the magic recharge.

He tried to think pleasant thoughts. To envision the world as it would be, when he had laced on the fully equipped Gauntlet.

How might he feel? How might he feel when he could do no wrong–could never _have done_ wrong, since he would have dominion over time as well? When no one could hurt him? When no one could defy him? (When no one could make him feel silly, or wrong, or out of place?) When he was solely the just and beloved King of the Realms, Asgard and its Old Ways be damned and forgotten?

Something about the dream was unsatisfying, and Loki reminded himself that, should he need to, he could always use the Mind Gem (once he had it) to wish himself satisfied.

Foolproof. His plan was foolproof. With the Gauntlet, he could not fail. He could only bring happiness to himself, and to the Realms.

At some point, Thor got up and moved his couch closer to Loki's.

At some later point–just before dawn, judging by the light–Loki fell asleep.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor takes a call with the Avengers on the Shield situation. Loki places wards on the house. Darcy is intrusive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We continue to put the c in h/c. Don't tell Loki.

The expected call came at a quarter to seven the next morning, Jane's phone vibrating on Thor's chest as he watched the front room grow light with the sunrise. He picked it up–sure enough, the little screen read, “Tony Stark”–and stole as quietly as he could onto the front patio.

“Hello, Tony.” 

“Yeah, hey there, Thunderdome,” Tony said. “Gang's all here. Put you on last, cause I thought the less time you're on the phone, the less chance you'll press something on accident and somehow manage to end the conference call.”

Thor felt a stab of irritation at Tony's persistent belief that Thor could not learn the ways of Midgard, but reminded himself that teasing was simply Tony's way. “Yes, most wise of you,” Thor said. “Hello all.”

A chorus of muted greetings followed this.

“Great, so,” Tony began. “I wanted to get us all together to talk about what Thor and I saw and did yesterday. I would've preferred Skype, but apparently Clint and Nat aren't capable where they're at–”

“Let's get on with this, Tony,” Natasha put in. “'Clint and Nat' are in a different time zone, and have things to do.”

“Fine, fine,” Tony said. “So here's the thing. Like I emailed you all, Shield captured Loki the night before last, and spent most of yesterday torturing him for information about his plans here on Midgard. Beside the fact that they didn't get anything out of him, this is clearly and blatantly against the contract Shield signed just on Wednesday, and it's a … being's rights violation on top of that, right? Amnesty International would not be pleased. So, generally not good on Shield. I took the initiative, you can thank me later, to set up a meeting with Shield later today. Any and all of our team can come, like I said in my email. So who's with us?”

“I am,” Steve said immediately. “Like I typed you. Emailed you.”

“S-mailed, actually,” Tony replied. “You have an at-stark-dot-com email address. Good choice, by the way. I'm trying to get the term to catch on. S-mail.”

Thor found his fist clinching as if to clutch at Mjolnir's handle, though the hammer was in his bedroom closet. He deliberately relaxed his hand.

He did not entirely like this. If it were up to him, Thor told himself, the Avengers would not be so quick to retaliate against Shield. This “meeting,” as Tony called it, seemed potentially premature. And while Thor was proud of himself for at least recognizing as much, he found himself tempted to resign fully to the idea that the Avengers would destroy Shield as a result of what it had done, and without further ado.

He barely hung on to the idea that he knew better. Was there not something ironic in doing to Shield on Loki's behalf what Thor always used to do to Loki–make assumptions, take the moral high ground?

But maybe–yet another counterweight to all this that Thor had to balance–Loki really _had_ done something wrong, this time. Perhaps Thor was giving Loki too much consideration. Or giving Shield too much consideration. Or not enough. Or something.

“I do not know,” he said finally. “I feel that we might do well to find out more about what Shield intended, before we initiate a conflict with them.”

A silence overtook the telephone line for just a moment before Tony's voice refilled it. “Oh, right, sorry,” he said. “I forgot, you're from a place where that's what this would be. No. We're not 'initiating conflict' with anything, Conan. We're taking a tour of Shield's facilities. To see what they're about, and to talk about Loki's 'interrogation.' That's all.”

… A tour? As of a museum, or a foreign capital?

Thor realized that no one else in the conference call was speaking, and that this silence probably meant he had said something foolish.

“We're not initiating a conflict,” he heard himself saying.

The disappointment in his voice was audible.

“Right,” Tony said. “We're asking questions now, and, uh, you know. Shooting later. Though hopefully not _that_ much later. I don't know what defense Shield can possibly give, it's really just a formality that we're asking questions at all–”

“No, Tony,” Steve put in. “It's not a formality.”

“Of course not,” Tony replied lightly.

Thor felt himself flush. He suddenly wished very much that he was a better liar. _Norns damn these feelings_ , Thor thought. _Embarrassment. Uncertainty_. How much longer could he keep this up?

“We will of course strike against Shield if we discover they had no defensible reason for their actions against Loki?” he said.

Immediately, he wanted to kick himself.

“Definitely,” Tony said, just as Steve put in, “It depends on what we find.”

Thor closed his eyes, and swallowed. “Right,” he said. “It depends on what we find.”

Another silence followed this.

“Look, Thor,” came Steve's voice after a few seconds. “If you need to talk or something before we go in today, you can come to my place. Just to clear your head. If you need to.”

A comfort, a feeling like lying down on a soft bed, spread through Thor. He did like talking to Jane when he felt uncertain. Perhaps he would like talking to his new shield brother as well. It was a fascinating and helpful Midgardian practice.

Thor nodded, then said, “Yes, Steve. Thank you.”

“No problem,” Steve said. “So what time should we be at Shield HQ, Tony?”

“Two-ish,” Tony replied. “Meeting's at one thirty, but I for one intend to be fashionably late.”

“We'll be there at one,” Steve said, tone good-natured and free of judgment.

“We're not coming,” Clint said. “Like I said, we're in … far the fuck away, and we've already seen most of what Shield's got going on anyway, considering we are in fact Shield agents. But we might be able to make the thing later tonight.”

“That's fine,” Tony said. “That's why I suggested we all get together at my place tonight, because I know you're out of the country. Where were you again? Malta? Djibouti?”

“Classified,” Natasha said. “Obviously.”

“I'm not coming because I don't care enough,” Bruce spoke up for the first time. “This isn't about human rights, or alien rights. It's a pissing contest you've started, Tony, and I'm not sure whose side I'm even on. This isn't like fighting these guys we've been dealing with recently, like the Warden, guys who are obviously breaking the law and hurting people. And for the record, I knew this day would come when the Avengers became political. I just don't know exactly what you think you'll manage to accomplish. Seems to me like you're poking a bear again.”

“And like I always say when you say that, how do you find out what a bear does when you poke it if you never poke a bear?” Tony asked innocently. “And besides, this is much more important than observational biology. Shield can't be allowed to go on this way unchecked. It's outrageous.”

“Okay, Tony, cool it before you start to believe your own B.S., huh?” Steve said.

“You do know 'B.S.' stands for a curse word, right?” Tony asked.

“Yes,” Steve said. “I do.”

“If that is all,” Thor put in, “I believe I will go now. I still have my brother to care for and attend to, before I start my journey to New York for our afternoon meeting. Thank you, Tony, for setting this up. It is … most critical at this stage that we determine Shield's intentions in this heinous action.”

“Yeah, determine their intentions, exactly,” Tony said. “And document them. You know, for posterity. You're starting to get this. See you later on. I'll, uh, s-mail you the info.”

“Thank you,” Thor said. “Goodbye.”

Without waiting for a response, Thor pulled the phone from his ear and ended the call.

That had been … mildly disastrous, Thor thought.

Thor wanted to see Shield, an organization he had been allied with for months now, turned to rubble beneath his boots. The very _thought_ eased something painful and hard in his chest.

Yet he knew this thought was off the mark.

The conflict in his feelings left Thor reeling and unsure he would _ever_ be able to decide whether he believed that Shield was–for lack of a better, more specific word–evil. Evil? Misguided? Acting in the wrong?

… Wronging people? That didn't sound harsh enough.

Again, images of Nick Fury, Maria Hill, and their many faceless attendants flying through the air to crash into the ground at a strike from Mjolnir flickered through Thor's mind. He prayed the investigations of the day gave him a reason to make these dreams a reality.

Oh, _Norns._ Had he really just had that thought?

Suddenly a bit nauseous, Thor surged to his feet and stalked back into the house, remembering only at the last minute to close the front door quietly in deference to Loki's sleep.

~*~

Loki jerked awake to leaden limbs, a headache, and the echoes of a nightmare: He had been Odin again, only this time Kvasir saw through him, destroyed Loki's illusion, and sentenced him to be returned to the Fae for the remainder of his lifespan.

A thin light suffused the small front room, dimmed by thick canvas drapes. Loki blinked up at the ceiling, listening for any sound that Shield or any other enemy was creeping through the brush outside.

No sound came to his ears save for that of the house's inhabitants quietly breathing, and what might have been Thor biting his fingernails. A new habit, that was, perhaps acquired from Jane. A nervous habit. That was strange, for Thor.

Loki knew he hadn't slept for long; the room had already been lightening when last he noted the time, and the sun was only now reaching the crest of full morning.

Yet he felt a small bit better, as if what sleep he had got had been deep. Perhaps it was; he had been exhausted. He was also no longer shaking, and his head was clearer than it had been at any point the evening before.

But he was still in quite a lot of pain, and felt too weak to lift himself easily, let alone to do any real defensive maneuvers. If he continued to rest for a little while, perhaps even went back to sleep, he would recover sooner.

It took about two minutes for that to get lost in the general din of Loki's thoughts. He pushed himself upright, blinking sleep from his eyes as he contemplated all there was for him to do.

The sound of Thor biting his nails paused. Loki dared a glance at his brother, darting his eyes to where the blond Asgardian prince sat on the long upholstered seat, holding Jane's phone in one hand and looking thoughtful

Thor smiled at him. “Good morning,” he said.

Loki waved general agreement, still a bit dazed.

“... Did you sleep?” Loki heard himself ask dumbly after a moment.

“It's alright,” Thor answered.

Loki looked away.

“How are your injuries?” Thor asked.

“Probably much the same as they were a few hours ago,” Loki answered.

Thor did not reply.

Loki tried standing up after another moment, and found that he was able. “I'm going to the … bathing chamber. Bath chamber,” he said.

“Bathroom,” Thor supplied. “Is what it's called here now. Are you alright to go alone?”

“I am perfectly alright,” Loki said, crossing the room to the small wooden door. 

The bathroom was small, clean and full of small homey touches that made Loki feel odd: Dried scented flowers in a dish on the back of the toilet, little dolls in the forms of the Avengers lined up along the sink counter.

But it had a lock. And any lock was sufficient excuse, if Loki put a small binding spell on the door, to make it impassable while he worked. As he cast the spell, the small expenditure of magic reminded him of how close to the bone he had been skating for days now when it came to his magic reserves. But he had a bit of magic back under his control after the sleep he'd gotten, and he had plenty to use it on.

He turned the shower on, as a cover, in case anyone wondered what he was doing. He could tell them he was flushing his wounds again.

Then he sat on the floor, and summoned the Reality Gem while touching the Space Gem. Conjured a viewing portal before him–but angled so that anyone who somehow barged into the room would see nothing–to Agent Wallman.

Asleep.

Loki switched targets.

Agent Satchell.

 _Oh, my_. That was an unusual position … Loki watched, for a while.

Then he switched targets.

Director Fury.

Ah. Good. Much more useful. Fury was at a desk, in an office that overlooked some bustling city in the morning light. Paperwork. Routine. Missions Loki didn't know about, but which didn't sound terribly important.

Someone knocked on the door to the bathroom in which Loki sat.

“I'll be out in a moment,” Loki hedged.

“I'm just checking on you,” Thor's voice replied.

“... I am alright.”

“... Okay then.”

Fury sat at his computer for a few minutes. Checked emails. Glanced around nervously, checked an alternative email account that was filled mostly with sports news update notifications. Read several articles about … Archery. Apparently, he was a huge fan of Chinese archery. 

Fury clicked back to his original email inbox. Opened an email he had apparently been avoiding. Sighed heavily. Pressed a button on a nearby circular plastic object.

“Grace,” he said. “Ask Wallman to bring me those standards reports I asked for, on enhanced interrogation levels eight through ten.”

“Absolutely, Sir!” said a bright voice.

Fury did not respond to that, removing his finger from the circular object. He returned his attention to the computer screen.

Loki switched back to Agent Wallman.

Placed a simple if-then spell upon her, using the Reality Gem and the Mind Gem:

If Fury is speaking to Thor about torture, then you will bring in those standards reports, and name them loudly enough that you can be heard even if the conversation is taking place heatedly, or over a phone.

There. That could work.

It was too easy. A chuckle bubbled in his chest, but he bit his lip to suppress it. He loved these moments.

Loki's leg throbbed, and the chuckle died. Perhaps it was not _too_ easy. Yesterday had been … out of hand. Loki listened once more for the sounds of anyone coming for him.

And was greeted with only the sounds of someone running water in a sink, someone tapping at a cell phone, and someone biting fingernails. 

So he had time to peer in on the other prisoners lined up for torture. The ones Loki had set up to take major falls, so that Thor could see their states and be outraged.

Maybe he could take a quick peek at them.

The Warden.

The middle-aged man quivered in the half-light of his cell, collapsed against one concrete wall on a thin metal bench. One of his legs, from knee to toes, was scored with crosswise inflamed indentations that told Loki quite clearly that the interrogators had used a tiger bench. 

A strong impulse to pull immediately away from this image broke over Loki. But he stared, deliberately. Waiting. The man whimpered, his eyes closed. 

Loki clapped his hands together, violently banishing the image.

He stared at the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink for a moment, thinking. 

Then he called up another viewing portal. Alejandra Fukashime.

_Oh, Norns._

Her back, turned up to the open air as she lay on the floor in the center of her cell, was torn as if by a million tiny hooks. Probably a cat-o-nine-tails.

None of these things–acid drips, tiger benches, cat-o-nine-tails–were normal parts of Shield's enhanced interrogation practices. 

Loki closed his eyes. _It doesn’t matter_ . _When I am King of all the Realms and the Universe, it will not matter._

Well. But. For now. Why not dial all this down, a bit? Just to make it less likely to go wrong.

Loki opened up the portal to the Warden again. He reached out for the Mind Gem. He could …

Loki set to work weaving small, subtle spells, and time passed. He thought of his own time with Wallman, the feeling of powerlessness, the pain. He wove protections for the prisoners to make them less susceptible to physical pain … yes … he could do that … he can shore up their … minds and thoughts, too, against the powerlessness … make them stronger, improve their wills …

Ah, no. This old man, who calls himself Victor Tryer, he can't be shored up … Fine … Loki changed Wallman's mind, made her desire to be lenient toward him …

A knock at the door. Loki jerked violently, his head snapping up to look at the door to the bathroom.

His back ached from hunching over the portal. His hands were shaking. Most of him was stiff, as if he had remained in the same pose for quite some time. He was nauseous, and he wasn't even sure when that had happened.

The door opened.

Loki quickly disappeared the viewing portal, and stared up at the figure that appeared in the doorway.

The sound of the shower was all that then hung between Loki, seated trembling on the bathroom floor, and Darcy, standing bewildered in the doorway.

“Oh well then,” Darcy said no sooner than the door had opened, rubbing at one eye. “Uh … sorry. I just … the door to this bathroom doesn't lock. It acts like it locks, but it doesn't lock.”

 _It may not lock, but I certainly placed a spell upon it_. Darcy's latent magic had been, up until this moment, a curiosity. It was officially a real annoyance.

“Uh, it's fine,” Loki said, hauling himself to his feet. He found he had to lean fairly heavily against the wall. “I'll just go. Please, feel free to … whatever.” He started out the door.

“The shower's still on,” Darcy noted.

“Oh, yes. Sorry. Is that abnormal?”

“Only when the person exiting the bathroom isn't wet.”

“I dried off.”

“There isn't a towel.” Darcy held out a rough looking cloth draped over one forearm. “This is a towel.”

They stared at each other.

Darcy looked wry and sort of knowing.

“What?” Loki tried finally, keeping his volume low; he could still see the top of Thor's head over the side of the long upholstered seat. “Can't a person seek out some time alone?”

Darcy's expression softened. “Of course they can,” she said. “But you don't have to use subterfuge to get it.”

Remaining in character, Loki considered this statement at face value. Actually, it was a fairly friendly and helpful idea. Loki still wasn't ready to forgive Darcy for last night's various … transgressions against his pride, however.

“Thank you,” he said stiffly.

“So … are you going to shower? Or bathe? Or something? Are you … even up to it?”

It was only then that Loki realized he would rather like a bath. He glanced back at the water, falling from a wall-mounted nozzle like rain, and nodded his head.

A while later–he had only used a “shower” for the purposes of cleaning himself twice before, and he still needed a few tiny bursts of magic to help him navigate the process–Loki emerged from the bathroom once more, a towel draped over one arm, having changed into fresh clothes from his storage dimension.

Jane stood before the stove, stirring something. Thor stood before some other piece of kitchen equipment, looking like a scullery maid as he examined a root vegetable. Darcy lounged on an upholstered chair near the bathroom door, holding another fresh towel.

Loki nodded to her and crossed back to the couch where he had spent the night, giving the kitchen and its food smells a wide berth as his stomach performed unhappy little flips. Darcy disappeared into the bathroom.

A sizzling sound from the kitchen had Loki hiding his eyes in the pillow to prevent gagging, and he realized that it was probably time to make a break for the upstairs. Perhaps the lock on the little guest room they had provided would work more adequately than the bathroom’s had.

“Are you hungry, Loki?” Jane asked from the kitchen.

“No,” Loki replied.

“You probably don't feel hungry,” Jane replied, “but that doesn't mean you aren't. I've been reading about the after-effects of extreme physical trauma–”

“I am no stranger to extreme physical trauma, as Thor will tell you, and I know for a fact that I am not hungry, thank you,” Loki said.

Jane did not reply, and Loki had begun to wonder what the vague guilt that this fact sparked could possibly mean when he felt a hand on his forearm. He looked up.

“Plain oatmeal,” Thor said, holding a small bowl out to Loki.

Oatmeal. It was one of the few typical Asgardian foods Loki found he could stomach in times of stress. Most foods made him nauseous when he was nervous. 

He scowled and debated the merits of asking Thor how in the Nine he knew what Loki would and would not be able to eat.

… He abandoned the notion. “Thor, I did not ask you to make me something–”

“I did it anyway.”

“You did not need to–”

“I did it anyway.”

Loki took the bowl. “Must I?” he asked.

"I think it would be good for you,” he said.

Loki sat up. It was not a completely impossible idea, eating the simple mush. “Fine,” he said at length.

Thor smiled and went back into the kitchen.

Darcy emerged from the bathroom after a while, and switched the TV on in her robe.

“... meets Monday in the Hague,” the anchor man said. “Sources tell us that Tony Stark and Steve Rogers will attend as special guests, though it is unclear whose side Rogers will come down upon. Up until now, Captain America–”

“... is a bitch,” the TV said as Darcy changed the channel. “She thinks she can just come into my house and act like that? That is not how it works, babe–”

The TV went off.

“Thank you,” Jane said. “Let's not have any of that.”

“TV used to be more fun, before the news became mostly about people we know,” Darcy muttered.

“Very sorry,” Loki heard himself say brightly. “I could make it up to you with a fireworks display, if you think that would do it.”

Darcy and Jane both laughed, and Loki found the sound made him, temporarily, less irritated.

“I really could, though,” he went on. He conjured a small burst of purple flame that sparked above he and Darcy in the front room.

“Don't set anything on fire,” Thor's voice came from the kitchen.

Loki found himself both stopping the conjuration and contemplating his revenge upon Thor simultaneously. 

After a little while longer – during which Loki struggle to finish a passable portion of the oatmeal – Jane's telephone rang from the kitchen.

“Ah, um, Director Fury … Yeah,” Loki heard her say. He sat up straighter and listened. “I, um. I'm giving the phone to Thor. Yes. Thanks. Uh … Bye?”

Thor pursed his lips and accepted the device. "Hello?" 

A voice on the other end of the line rumbled briefly.

"I am well, Director," Thor said in answer, his jaw clenching visibly. "And you?"

The rumbling was this time occasionally spiked with a higher pitch.

"No, it did not, Director," Thor replied. "You lied to, kidnapped, and tortured my brother. So no, it did not occur to me. I do wonder, however, if it crossed _yours_ to ask _me_ whether you could take him in the first place. I suspect that it did not, and that the reason it did not is that you intended not to be found out. My finding out is your real issue. Am I wrong?"

Thor gripped the edge of a kitchen counter with his right hand, knuckles going white even as his expression seemed to become miserable rather than angry, which Loki thought was odd.

On the other end of the phone call, the higher pitches overtook the rumble in frequency. Fury went on for some time. Thor's face betrayed a gradual loss of patience, misery giving way to controlled rage.

"Well then I suppose we shall see what happens," Thor replied eventually. "I wish the best of luck with your weapons development. But remember what my mother always told me: A man who bears a dagger into a tavern will find a place to stick it."

An angry interjection came from the other end of the line, just as Loki’s mouth fall open at Thor's bizarre quotation; Frigga had said that, many times, but neither son had ever put much stock in the sentiment.

"Goodbye, Director," Thor said. “I will see you this afternoon …. Oh, you did not hear? Jane and I will attend your meeting with Tony later today. We are most interested to hear more about your interrogation techniques.”

A resigned rumble on the other end of the line, and Thor hung up.

Loki looked at him, arranging his face to show concern and poorly-concealed fear. "What happened?" he asked. "I presume that was our mutual friend Nicholas."

"Yes," Thor said, setting the phone on the kitchen table with distaste. "He wanted to know why I didn't just _ask_ that you be returned to me."

Loki did not need to fake the derisive laugh with which he responded to this statement. "I'm certain that would have cleared everything up," he said.

"Well, it could have," Jane put it. "Couldn't it? You could have at least tried."

"I did no harm," Thor replied, looking at his feet. "Except perhaps to one steel door, three guns, and one young man's career, but I believe Tony will be resolving any damage caused to the career."

"Well, it doesn't matter whether an eye for an eye is alright at this point,” Jane said. “The eyes have been exchanged.” 

“So,” Loki put in nonchalantly. “You're going to meet with him later today?”

Thor nodded, not meeting Loki's gaze. “Is that alright?”

Loki grinned. “Of course,” he said. “I understand completely.”

“Thank you,” Thor said. “Loki, I intend to make them pay for every inch of harm that befell you. Do you understand?”

Loki nodded. This was, finally, the way Loki had expected Thor to react. The kindness and care had been … odd. Righteousness, any excuse to be the good guy over obvious bad guys – that was more Thor's style.

The result of their leaving was apparently twofold.

First, they hoped very much that Loki was up to placing those magical wards upon the house now, so that he would not be unprotected while Thor was away.

Second, Darcy would be going to a friend’s house across town while Loki was alone. 

And so, to take care of Loki while Jane and Thor were gone, a trusted friend of theirs would be coming over.

"Selvig," Jane said. "I hope that's ok."

Loki almost laughed. "You hope it's ok for who?" he asked.

"He'll be fine," Jane said. "He's a big boy."

Loki shrugged.

“Oh, and this,” Jane said. She drew a telephone from her pocket and came into the front room to set it on the low wooden table near Loki. “It has my number, which Thor just uses most of the time, programmed in. And Selvig's. And Darcy's, in case of absolute emergency. And also, the actual earth emergency line, for real, medical emergencies.”

Loki thanked Jane for this, unsure how else to react.

“You're certain you will be alright?” Thor said quietly as Jane went to the bedroom to ensure she and Thor had packed what they would need for what might become an overnight trip.

“I am certain,” Loki said casually. There was a small unpleasant feeling at the core of him – something to do with Thor's attitude about Loki's injuries – but it was not panic, and it was not rage, and so he found it easy to ignore.

Thor's eyes gleamed in a way Loki could not quite interpret, but Loki shrugged off the expression. “Good,” Thor said. “Can you set the wards now?”

Loki found that he could, though the activity was draining. By the time he had finished trailing a rune of ashes made with a lock of Jane’s hair over and around the little house and gas station, he was tired enough to nearly gracefully accept assistance in walking the rest of the magic circuit.

He cast a spell to prevent anyone aggressive against himself, Thor, Jane or Darcy from passing over the ash of the rune. He enhanced the spell to set fire to any such individuals who tried to pass through the barrier.

… He dialed up the fire's strength.

Finally, with the Reality Gem, he cast a probability spell over the ash as well, which would make it extremely unlikely for anything harmful and inanimate to successfully pass over the barrier.

The ash boiled and set into the asphalt, then disappeared as the spell took hold. 

When that was done, it was a few moments before Loki realized that he was in the front room again, on the protected couch.

“There you are!” Darcy said. “You were out cold for a while.”

Loki blinked up at her, noting that his head was – somehow – lying in her lap. Jane and Thor knelt nearby, near enough that Loki wondered whether they had been hovering over him before he opened his eyes.

“I …” Loki shifted his head from side to side. “Generally if I return to consciousness while in a woman's lap, it is under rather different circumstances.”

Darcy laughed. “Turn on your side,” she said cryptically in response.

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

Loki did.

A warm pressure began on the back of his neck, carefully away from the bandage nearby. The pressure, which he realized was fingers, began to rub in slow, firm circles.

That was. Rather nice.

Actually. That was more than rather nice. Loki's eyes closed again.

At some point, he thought the fingers might have moved to his scalp and continued their ministrations, but he had by then lost any real connection with the world.

The last thought he had was about how truly strange this interlude at Jane’s house was proving to be.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor and Jane leave Loki alone. What could go wrong?

"Loki."

No. Stop. I like it here, in the warm dark.

"Loki, wake up."

Loki opened his eyes.

Erik Selvig stood above where Loki lay on the protected couch. He was holding out a cellular phone and frowning, his lined face lit from the side by slanted afternoon light.

Loki ignored Selvig's expression and took the phone. "Who is it?" he asked the scientist.

"Thor," Selvig replied, crossing the room to sit on the upholstered chair farthest from Loki.

Loki sent a small tendril if magic into the phone to detect enchantments and other magical alterations. Finding none, he put the device to his ear.

"Thor," he said.

"Loki. Greetings. How do you fare?"

"Um." Loki thought about the true answer to this question – tired, groggy, in pain, and yet definitely better – and then thought about what answer might get Thor to hang up more quickly.

"Better, I believe,” Loki said finally.

"Good," Thor replied. "I wanted to update you on the situation here with Shield."

"Ah," Loki said. "Please do."

Thor commenced relating the experiences that he, Jane, and the Avengers had stumbled into since leaving that morning. Apparently, they had all placed an outraged conference call to Director Fury from Tony's lab. And, during the call, one of Fury's agents had inadvertently revealed to the assembled Avengers that there are _ten levels_ of enhanced interrogation at Shield.

"I had to calm Steve down," Thor said. "Especially when we found out what happened to you was filed only as a level _eight_."

"Norns, Thor, I'm sorry," Loki said. "As I said last night."

"I know. But it is better that we know, then that we remain ignorant to facts we do not like. No?"

"Absolutely," Loki said, working to keep himself from grinning.

"We're going to meet with the Director now to discuss the levels of torture. Will you be alright with Selvig?"

"I am certain we can find something to talk about."

Thor paused. Then chuckled. Loki was a bit taken aback by the sound; Loki's sense of the absurd generally went over Thor's blonde head. "Do not hurt him," Thor said after a moment.

"Of course not," Loki answered, only partially feigning a tone of offense. "... And good luck. Whatever good luck might mean in this instance."

"Thank you, brother. Be well."

Loki licked his lips. They were dry. "Um, yes," he replied.

The two men said their goodbyes and hung up. Loki held the phone out to Selvig.

Selvig stared at him, hard, bolt upright on the couch as if it were the captain's chair of a starship.

"You've got them all done up petty good," he said after a moment. "It's less obvious than last time."

"I don't know what that means," Loki replied. He tossed the phone onto the low wooden table.

"But my question then is, why not me, too?" Selvig continued. "Or can you only do it once to any particular individual?"

"Mind expansion?" Loki said lightly. "I don't have that power. The scepter did."

"And yet clearly that's not true, since you've mind controlled people left and right over the last few days, and you haven't got your scepter."

"You are a scientist, Erik. That was circular logic. You can do better."

Selvig leaned forward. "Alright," he said. "How's this. I am on to you. Despite your words and your tricks. I know for a fact you're here to do no good."

"Premonition, Erik? Intuition? Gut-feeling? Did the Tesseract not teach you better than that?"

The scientist's face shut like a clam. "Don't talk to me about the Tesseract," he said. "I understood her in a way you never will."

Loki leaned back, enjoying this now. "That, I can believe," he said. "... Would you like to study her again?"

Yes, Loki thought. That was a spark of longing he saw in the twitch of Selvig's lips.

"How can you offer that, if you gave her up?" Selvig said.

"I was merely going to suggest you apply to Shield to work on the project," Loki shrugged. "I am certain they would appreciate the expertise that only you have."

"... Enough of this," Selvig said. "I can't make you straighten up, so I'm not going to try. But know this. Jane is a good girl. A good woman. Spare her. Please. Take me again, if you need a scientist for your schemes this time. I can't imagine you trust me after I created that fail-safe, but I’m willing to submit to any mental manipulation you think is necessary."

Loki smirked. "Really, Erik, you think you would have created a fail-safe if I had not wanted you to create a fail-safe?"

Selvig's lips parted. "I ..." Then his features went stony again. "No games, Loki. I'm not here to talk about old times. Just to tell you there is no reason for you to use Jane."

"Fine," Loki said. "That's quite noble of you. I will keep it in mind should I hatch any plots."

Selvig nodded, and stood. "Now I'm going back into town on personal business," he said. "Try not to destroy the house while I am gone."

"You're going to leave me alone?" Loki said. "But I could get up to all sorts of mischief."

"As if my presence here prevents one ounce of that," Selvig muttered, taking his wallet and keys from a table near the door. "I'll be back later."

Loki nodded and the door shut, leaving him alone.

Thor, Loki though, balling his hands into fists until he could once again feel the bite of his nails on his palms.

Had Thor not made noises like he gave a damn that Loki was recently apparently dead? And yet now here he was, leaving Loki alone with an unwilling babysitter, after all that had happened to Loki the day before.

And Loki had believed Thor might have started to see Loki as a real, living being. _Foolish, little thought._

No matter. There was no need for Thor to like Loki. He clearly did not need to like Loki in order to take Loki's torture as an opportunity for righteous, golden anger.

Fantastic.

Loki sunk down further on the couch and went over each attempt he had made upon Thor's life, reliving each in great detail as he picked at the cuts on his palms.

Then he changed the ending of every attempt, so that he succeeded.

He would never actually try it, again, he told himself. But it did no harm to imagine.

... Loki should stage a second kidnapping. When Thor returned, this time, Loki would be gone, the house ransacked, the ash pentagram ruined.

_Then Thor would feel bad, for leaving him alone._

No, Loki. You have plenty you could be doing. Focus on that.

Right.

He switched on the "television," giving it a little magic command to show him a Midgardian news program.

"... can't do that, they really can't," a short, balding man was saying. "And have you heard the response from Director Fury? Have you heard this? Bill, play that clip--"

Director Fury appeared on the screen, standing at a podium. "Shield was created," he said, staring down at a piece of paper and sounding aggressively annoyed, "to keep the world safe from exactly this kind of extraordinary threat. If we back down now, we are failing to do exactly what we are meant to. Some of those who would have us give up the Infinity Gems may be well-intentioned, but others, you can be sure, just hope to gain their power for themselves." He looked up. "So fuck them," he said.

Loki smirked and, using the Reality Gem, turned the television off. Fury could almost certainly be relied upon to keep the Gems firmly in his vaults.

Loki waved one hand and brought the Warden into view again.

He was seated upright now, muttering to himself.

All in all, that was an improvement, wasn't it? What else could Loki do for him?

Alejandra Fukashime. Her back was still a mass of torn skin and dried blood, but she was knelt on the floor, observing prayer.

Victor Tryer? Released. In a private hospital, hooked up to an IV.

Loki exhaled.

What more could he do for them, other than what he had done yesterday?

Plenty, a voice in his head said.

… Claire's voice? Frigga's?

 _No_. It was too risky. He could not afford the possibility that the touch of mind control be discovered in anyone's head who had a relationship with Shield. The organization would assume it was Loki's doing, and that would jeopardize his plans.

Time to take a look at Thor and the Avengers.

He called up a viewing portal and was, once again, greeted with an image that involved Director Fury.

He stood in a poorly lit hallway with the Iron Man without his iron, Captain America, Thor, and Jane.

"... available information, alright?" Stark was saying.

"I think that makes a lot of sense," Fury said, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

Thor was standing protectively in front of Jane, between her and Fury.

"I hope you do," Tony went on. He pulled his eternally present telephone-like device from one pocket of his canvas jacket and began to tap at it. "We'll just take a look at some of those deep-classified Shield files–"

"Wait, are you hacking into our databases again?" Fury asked. "How is that possible? Our IT team said the new security software we built is impenetrable except from the inside."

"Mmm, it is," Tony replied. "Also, it's based on a Stark Technologies program I wrote. Did you know that? And I can't hack it. Which, incidentally, solves the omnipotence paradox, doesn't it? God can in fact create a mountain he can't move himself." He held up the screen of his phone to Steve, who stared at it. "I'm not hacking anything," Tony went on. "I'm just going through those files I got before, when you called us all onto the hellicarrier. I'm now looking through the files–because there are just so many of them, I haven't been able to read them all just yet–for 'enhanced interrogations' gone wrong, protocols violated, stuff like what we've just seen here. And, uh, Jarvis detects that there is a distinct pattern of that sort of thing happening."

"Based on old information–"

"Onye year old," Tony said. "What have you done in the last twelve months to become a model of morality?"

Well, Loki thought. That was going well.

Not that the Avengers had ever been terribly difficult to manipulate.

He'd even managed it during his attempted invasion of Midgard, and if ever there was a time in Loki's life when he wasn't thinking clearly, it was then.

He would never forget the moment he stood watching Selvig and the other scientists gathered around the Tesseract, all of them grinning happily like children at Yule, and all Loki could do was wonder how they could be happy and satisfied, when Loki could not feel those feelings, and wasn't everything essentially just a projection of his will and imagination now?

Or the time he was walking down a Midgardian sidewalk toward a new recruit, in disguise, and a television fell from a window to land in front of him, and he couldn't for a moment comprehend how the universe could surprise him when he was supposed to be controlling it.

And then one day he had found himself standing on top of Stark tower, watching that old familiar crackle of rage in Thor's blue eyes, and he had realized all at once that Midgard was a place, full of beings, and he had unleashed a war upon it.

And then he was kneeling in his cell on Asgard, Frigga beside him–though unreal–and insisting, again and again and again, that he was _not still falling, had not been falling for quite some time, was here, right here, on the ground._

That was the first thing Frigga did for him, while he languished in that cell: Convince him that he was standing on the ground.

He still forgot, from time to time. But not too often.

His hands went automatically to the edge of his tunic and he grasped it tightly, feeling the sturdy material on his palms.

Loki's throat felt hot.

Frigga. He had been so sure, when she died, that he just needed to kill Kursed, see his blood spill onto soil, and Frigga would return to him, perhaps spring up from the spilled blood by some ancient magic Loki could feel sometimes but had never seen.

Then Loki died.

But when he awoke in the _Serenity II_ , Kursed was still dead, and so was Frigga.

He would bring her back himself, now. The second he had the Gauntlet and all six Gems to himself.

Which could not happen until the damned Channeler stopped stalling and tried to take what Loki knew he wanted.

Loki closed the portal to the Avengers, sitting up straight again.

He must somehow get news of The Channeler. He could _not_ not know.

What if Thanos was wrong? What if The Channeler was not even interested in this universe’s Midgard? Nothing Loki had seen around The Channeler, when Loki _had_ scried him successfully, had told Loki _anything_ about where he was or what he wanted. Just that he was living in a mountain on a planet with constant cloud cover and very few land animals, alone, like a damned _monk._

And now, Loki could not even scry him to watch him toast his fish or greet his mailman. 

So. It was time. Loki was out of other options. It was either a blind jump through space to wherever The Channeler was, or a journey to Asgard and the Book of Rettligr. 

And Loki was _not at all_ _interested_ in hearing what the Book would have to say about his character.

He would have to try a jump through space to wherever The Channeler was actually located. Loki could go in disguise.

His heart sped up at the thought. Thanos feared The Channeler; a Titan feared this being. It would be quite dangerous to try and spy upon the man in person. Loki's final, planned confrontation with The Channeler – when The Channeler would hopefully attempt to steal the Gems – was a safer prospect, because Loki would be surprising the other sorcerer. But to jump blindly into The Channeler's presence ... that was another thing. Perhaps, even if Loki were invisible, The Channeler would see him immediately. And no sorcerer likes to be spied upon.

Or, Loki would be unable to jump to The Channeler's location, and would end up lost in space and reality. With a blind jump, that was a distinct possibility.

But if he didn't try ... The sick feeling of stepping blindfolded onto that plank roiled through his stomach again.

Despite the unprecedentedly long sleep he'd just had, Loki found himself very tired. No solution any way he turned. He had five Infinity Gems, and he couldn't figure out how to spy on one obsessively ascetic sorcerer.

So, he would make the blind jump.

He grabbed, once again, for the Reality and Space gems, and closed his eyes.

He concentrated on the idea of The Channeler, just as before. But this time he pushed his will into the magical landscape within the Space Gem, feeling it move across worlds, roving blindly, searching for–

A crash, like breaking glass. A voice.

Someone was coming, someone had found him out. The Other was coming to drag him to the throne room again. Someone–

Loki wrenched his eyes open and his magic back into himself, blood singing in his ears, and threw a bolt of pure energy toward the sound.

It hit the plaster wall of the entryway with a whump, crashing through it to reveal the dark inside of the hall closet. The door frame to Jane and Thor's room buckled slightly as the sound reverberated through the living room.

Bits of plaster fell onto the tile of the entryway. The hole smoked.

Darcy Lewis stood beside the destruction, mouth open, staring at Loki with one arm raised inexplicably into the air. The other gripped a large brown paper bag to her chest.

"Oh, Fates, Darcy, pissing hell," Loki babbled, adrenaline evaporating.

Darcy's made a frightened noise.

Loki noticed his breath beginning to speed up of its own accord, and gave into the impulse to bow his head between his knees and attempt to breathe deeply.

A few moments passed in silence.

"Fuck, Loki," he heard Darcy say eventually from the entryway. "You … you just put a hole in the wall. You could have killed me."

Loki made a gesture of assent with one hand, without raising his head. A smell like some sort of liquor permeated the room. What was that Mediterranean drink ... Ouzo? No, too sharp. He could not identify it.

"... Do you do that kind of thing a lot?" came Darcy's voice again, a little shakily.

"What kind of thing?"

"Throw potentially deadly magic around when you're startled?"

"Ah ... Yes. It is really best not to startle me."

"… Alright then. I will definitely keep that in mind."

A clanking sound came from the front room. Footsteps. A door opening from the kitchen. A harsh sound like boots scraping on broken glass. Another door.

Darcy's sneakered feet came into view on the carpet in front of Loki.

"Loki ... Are you okay?"

"I am fine."

"I startled you pretty bad, huh?"

"Why yes, Darcy, you did."

"Can we keep in mind I'm the one who just almost died, though?"

"... I could repair you from any injury short of immediate death. I think. Probably."

"Well that's handy. It would still hurt like a mother fucker."

"I am – it was unintentional."

"Well," Darcy said brightly. "An apology is nice. And maybe try and reign those impulses in, while you're here. Meanwhile, I will try not to startle you.”

Loki bobbed his head in a nod and Darcy's leg brushed his. The couch cushion dipped as she sat down beside him. He heard a series of artificial-sounding beeps and clicks and knew she was doing something on her cell phone.

After a few minutes, Loki concluded that if he sat up he would be in no particular danger of either hyperventilating or wringing Darcy's neck. And so, after casting a small glamour over his features and hair to make himself look better-rested and better-groomed, he straightened.

Darcy stared down at her phone, where fast-moving, colorful images glided about as she manipulated them with touches from her thumbs.

Loki watched for a while, inferring after a few moments that the activity was a game of reflexes focused on the well-timed swiping of flying Midgardian foodstuffs.

Her large brown paper bag was sitting on the low table in the center of the room. The alcohol smell had dissipated some. Nothing about the scene threatened, or required action.

Loki's mind flashed with the need to retreat from Darcy's presence, to continue with his plans.

But what was she doing here? And what was she doing on her phone? What was in the brown paper bag? Why did it smell like ouzo in this room?

And why had Darcy come, when Thor and Jane told her not to?

"What are you doing?" Loki asked, leaning toward Darcy's phone.

"Fruit Ninja," Darcy said simply. As if that explained anything at all. "Wanna try?"

Loki did.

He got the hang of the game quickly, though he did not recognize all the items he was slashing.

"What's in the bag and why does the room smell like liquor?" he asked as he swiped with a flourish.

"Liquor is in the bag, and it smells like liquor because I dropped a bottle of gin and it broke," Darcy said. "I thought that's what startled you."

Loki missed a large green object on the screen and the fruits disappeared. "Game Over," the screen read. Loki frowned.

"You tap here for a new game," Darcy said.

"Thank you."

"Mmhm."

"I suppose that is what startled me," Loki went on. "What is that pink thing?"

"Strawberry."

"I knew it was something like that. Why did you bring a bag full of liquor here?"

"To drink it."

"Alright then." Loki missed a strawberry, and steeled himself. One more lost fruit and it was game over. "Why are you here, anyway?"

"Are you kidding?" Darcy asked. "Did you honestly believe I would stay away just because Jane told me to? I don’t think _Jane_ even believed I would stay away just because she told me to."

Loki grinned. "I did, but I am more than glad to hear that you intended defiance," he said.

"Lonely?"

"Um, no. I just like to see the youth flout authority."

"I'm 25!"

"I'm 1,001."

"How old is that for an Aesir?"

"I am approximately one fifth of the way toward being dead."

"Good god, that is so unfair."

"I suppose it is."

"Well, I'm about a quarter of the way toward being dead, so proportionally I'm older than you."

Loki made a noise and swiped at a banana.

"So Selvig's gone, huh?" Darcy asked.

"He said he had personal business."

"His niece got scared about him being in the same house as the guy who mind controlled him before."

"He told you?"

"No. I put his niece up to it. We went to school together for a while."

Loki missed every single strawberry in a sudden barrage that burst onto the screen.

"Game over," Darcy said.

"You drew Selvig away?" Loki asked.

Darcy nodded, taking the phone from him and starting herself a game.

"Darcy," Loki said carefully. "Is this a seduction?"

Darcy tapped something on the screen swiftly and her phone's display was overtaken by the word "Pause." She looked up at him with one eyebrow raised. "Loki, there's still a hole in your leg, and I hardly know you," she said.

"There are many who would take no issue with any of that."

"... Wait. Are you coming onto _me_ , now?"

Loki considered his options briefly.

"No," he said finally, raising his hands to look innocent. "Well, not particularly. I mean, you're my brother’s ward –"

"Ward."

"I mean you're in his keeping –"

"Keeping."

"I mean you're ... His friend. Alright? You're his friend."

Darcy's eyebrow remained arched. "And you've been overcome with a sudden attack of honor?"

"Look, I just ... It had not occurred to me in any great detail. To seduce you. I have been preoccupied."

"'In any great detail?'" Darcy asked, giving him a half-smile.

“Naturally I am always examining the angles at which I could go about any number of things, but only when I set upon a course do I consider it in any great detail.”

“Ah,” Darcy said with a laugh. She looked back down at her phone and resumed slashing. “I see.”

"So if this is not you seducing me, Darcy Lewis, why the bag of liquor and the engineering of time alone?"

"Therapy," Darcy said simply.

"Oh Fates," Loki said, leaning his head back against the couch. "That's worse. You aim to save me?"

"Therapy for _me_ ," Darcy corrected.

That was new. "And how are liquor and Loki therapy for you? As you said you hardly know me."

"Yeah. But you seem fun. And all my friends from grad school are home for the summer. A girl needs a drinking buddy. You think you're up to it?"

"Well I really ought to say no, all things considered," Loki said, putting his feet up on the low wooden table. He managed not to wince at the pain in his leg. "So yes, absolutely."

"I knew you'd be a trooper," Darcy responded.

"Wait," Loki said, remembering something. "If you're not seducing me, what was that you did to me earlier today?"

"When?"

"After I set the wards. When I was lying in your lap."

"A neck massage, Loki. I give them to Jane all the time. It is nonsexual. Well, if you intend for it to be. Do they not have massages on Asgard?"

"Only for horses."

"But you're a horse sometimes, right? No problem."

"... No, I am not a horse sometimes.” 

"Oh," Darcy said. "I guess that's just a myth."

A destroyed banana on the screen burst open to reveal the words:

"High score!"

"Sweet," Darcy said, pausing the game and darkening the phone. Then she looked at Loki. "So. What are you. A rum man, a whiskey man, vodka?"

Loki considered. "I have enjoyed rum upon occasion," he said. "I do not think I have had the pleasure of vodka before, however. I believe I will start with that."

"Victory!" Darcy said, standing up. "I'll get glasses."

She left Loki sitting alone on the couch and passed into the kitchen.

... What was happening, just at present? Was Loki about to get drunk with a mortal because ... Because her "friends are out of town"?

And did that mortal seem to think Loki a suitable replacement?

And was Loki completely, utterly at peace with all these facts?

Uh ... Yes, yes and, apparently, yes. He hadn't gotten good and drunk since before he imprisoned Thanos. And, seeing as he'd slept for hours that day, he was feeling up to having some fun for the first time in ... He stopped trying to remember how long.

And besides, the universe had all of, what? Sixteen days until it was in danger. That's how long he had to make sure he found The Channeler. The blind jump could wait one night.

The prospect of trying these Midgardian liquors excited him, Loki realized. And, well. It wasn't as if Loki had people clamoring to recreate with him on a regular basis.

Mind control was working out for his benefit in all _sorts_ of interesting ways. He would recommend it to any aspiring tyrant with no real friends.

"What about tequila?" Darcy asked, coming back into the room. "What are your feelings on the subject."

"A solely Midgardian drink, I think. New to me."

"Perfect."

Darcy sat down on the floor beside the bag, armed with a stack of glasses, several green fruits, and a container of salt.

"I'll show you how to do it," she said.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love <3


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